HIV/Aids

Andrew Mitchell: The whole House will be relieved that the Secretary of State was not caught up in the Prime Minister's botched reshuffle at the weekend. In view of the commitment made at Gleneagles last year to providing universal access by 2010 to treatment for AIDS—and of the reality that today, one child is dying every minute from AIDS—will the Secretary of State meet pharmaceutical industry representatives to encourage them to develop paediatric drugs for children with HIV, particularly given that there is no market for, or demand for, such drugs in the west?

Hilary Benn: I share the concern that the hon. Lady expresses at the end of her question about the report put out by Save the Children yesterday on what seems to have been happening in Liberia. Sadly, that is not the first occasion when UN peacekeeping troops appear to have been involved in sexual exploitation: the House will be aware of the problems that came to light in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is essential that organisations involved in peacekeeping and development assistance ensure that that does not happen, and if it does come to light, that those responsible are called to account.
	I will reflect on the hon. Lady's first point about ensuring that we have appropriate procedures in place, but we work hard to ensure that the money that we give is used for the purpose for which it is intended and is not used as a way of exploiting young women. One has to recognise, however, that a high proportion of those who are HIV positive are young women, and that reflects fundamentally their lack of power in the societies in which they live.

Gareth Thomas: The overwhelming majority of internally displaced people are found among ethnic groups in eastern Burma. The Thai-Burma Border Consortium has estimated the number of IDPs in eastern Burma as being at least 540,000 people. Despite the extremely difficult operating environment, a recent review of our programme in Burma concluded that the projects we had initiated were making good progress against their initial objectives.

Gareth Thomas: I am sure that the whole House will join the hon. Gentleman in his implicit recognition of the courage of the aid workers working with internally displaced people in eastern Burma. I certainly do. We currently provide some £500,000 a year to the International Committee of the Red Cross to work with people who have lost their homes, and often their families, as a result of the human rights abuses and fighting taking place in Burma. In addition, we support the Thai-Burma Border Consortium which provides help to people who have left Burma because of the fighting.

Gareth Thomas: I agree with my hon. Friend that it is clear that systematic human rights abuse is taking place on a very large scale in Burma. He is right that we in the UK do not have the substantial leverage needed to make an immediate difference. We work with our EU neighbours and through the UN to highlight the continuing human rights abuses. Successive UN resolutions have highlighted and condemned the human rights violations in Burma, and we have played a leading role in bringing the matter to the UN General Assembly in the past. We continue to press for it to be discussed in the UN Security Council, but it is true that a number of full members of that council do not yet agree that it should be placed on its formal agenda. We continue to work for a reversal of that situation.

Gareth Thomas: My hon. Friend is right to say that as well as focusing on the needs of internally displaced people, we must also recognise the needs of other vulnerable people in Burma. As Burma has the worst AIDS epidemic in Asia, we have continued to seek agreement with like-minded donors for a common fund to address AIDS, TB and malaria. We were disappointed that, owing to difficult operating circumstances, the global fund had to cease its operations, but we continue to work for the establishment of such a common fund so that we can scale up the assistance that we are already providing.

Andrew Miller: Over and above the fantastic work that is being done by my right hon. Friend, some amazing work is also being done by young people from Cheshire. Has he seen my letter to him of 28 April, bringing to his attention the work of 12 young fire cadets who alone have raised £30,000 and who have been to Ghana to build a school themselves? That is the kind of leadership that we need for our young people. Will he engage with those young people and extend that scheme right across the country to help to match what he is doing in his Department?

Hilary Benn: The hon. Gentleman makes a very important point about the need to harness all the resources that are available to ensure that all those children go to school. That includes the voluntary sector and faith organisations, because particularly in countries that are recovering from conflict, the only institutions that are still left standing are the Churches, the armed forces and, in some respects, the state, and we must consider all the means that are available to us. The real answer to his question is that it will depend on the plans that the countries themselves draw up, but if we are going to achieve that target by 2015, it is important that we draw on all the resources that are available to help to make it happen.

Malcolm Bruce: Does the Secretary of State acknowledge that achieving the millennium development goal of universal education is welcome, but making education free does not make it compulsory, and that in many cases, it can lead to a loss of quality, with very large class sizes and poorly trained teachers? What is he doing to make sure that we not only deliver volume in education, but ensure the quality that achieves what is intended?

Hilary Benn: The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. The school that I visited recently in Mozambique has 4,200 children and runs four shifts a day. Those in the last shift often have their education cut short because the lights go out, since the school cannot afford the electricity bill. There are holes in the roof, some children sitting on the floor and class sizes of 70 and above. That demonstrates the need for more resources, more planning, more teachers, more classrooms, more books and more equipment. What developing countries need from us, as we play our part in helping them to achieve that goal, is money that they can rely on to plan, to put into their proposals and to add to the resources that they can raise, because that is the only way in which we are going to make progress.

David Cameron: I join the Prime Minister in paying tribute to the servicemen and women who died in Iraq. They were serving their country.
	Three weeks ago, I asked the Prime Minister about the crisis in children's hospitals. He said that everything was fine. So, can he explain why the Minister responsible for hospitals has resigned?

Tony Blair: The Minister for hospitals has certainly not resigned, as far as I am aware, in respect of anything to do with children's hospitals. The right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) did indeed ask me about the position of children's hospitals and I explained that there were issues in respect of the payment-by-results tariff for children's hospitals. Discussions are continuing between the hospitals that wrote to the Department of Health, and I hope that those discussions will result in a satisfactory conclusion.

Tony Blair: The number has gone up simply because as the police investigate each of the cases, the details of those cases change— [Interruption.] That is perfectly obvious, if one thinks about it for a moment. However, of the 1,000 cases of foreign national prisoners who were part of the backlog that had built up over a considerable time, three quarters have been considered. Almost 600 deportation orders have been given and about 30 deportations are already under way. There are 126 of those people in detention. We will continue to work through the backlog, as I explained before, but I might just state to the right hon. Gentleman that now, as a result of the changes that have been put in place, all cases are considered before release. As I explained to him last week, there is a quite separate issue with which we must also deal, which is, in the end, at the heart of the matter: we need to ensure that those people who are convicted of a serious criminal offence and become foreign prisoners are deported, not retained in this country.

Tony Blair: If I can just go back to deal with the two policy issues that the right hon. Gentleman raised— [Interruption.] Well, I know that he is not very comfortable with policy. Actually, because I thought that we might be debating these types of issues, I asked my staff to look up what policies he has. I have found two: one on children's clothes and one on chocolate oranges. Other than that, he does not seem to have any, so I am delighted to have a policy debate with him.
	On the health service, in respect of children's hospitals, there is an issue to do with payment by results and the tariff. At a meeting a few days ago we listened to the representations of the four hospitals that wrote to us, and we are satisfied that we can reach a satisfactory conclusion. I might just point out to the right hon. Gentleman that we are putting more money into the health service than ever before and getting better results than ever before, but he opposed that additional investment.
	I have explained the situation regarding the foreign national prisoners to the right hon. Gentleman. As I said a moment or two ago, for the first time we now have in place a proper system that allows us to consider for deportation prior to a prisoner's release. However, as I said last week—I repeat it—in my view, there should be an automatic presumption of deportation for anyone convicted of a serious criminal offence, and I hope that he agrees with that.

Tony Blair: It will not surprise the right hon. Gentleman to know that I have no intention of debating that with him—[Hon. Members: "Why not?"] Frankly, there are probably enough lining up to do that already.
	What is interesting about this exchange is that policy is the one thing that the right hon. Gentleman does not want to talk about. I agree that it has been a difficult time for the Government, but, in the end, it is policy—policies on the economy, on investment in our public services, on things like the minimum wage and lifting children and pensioners out of poverty, on overseas aid and, yes, on the environment, on which he has already changed the policy he had a few weeks ago—that will ultimately determine the fate of this Government and the decision of the electorate at the next general election.

Tony Blair: I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that kind advice, which I am sure was meant in the interests of me and my party.
	It is important for us to deliver our manifesto. That manifesto is about making sure that we keep a strong economy. We have the lowest interest rates and the lowest unemployment for decades. It is about delivering extra investment in the national health service and schools. It is also about improving the minimum wage, maternity pay and maternity rights. Further, as we shall see over the next few weeks, it is about sorting out the pensions issue and energy policy.
	There is one difference between myself and the right hon. Gentleman. I am here delivering the manifesto on which we were elected. The right hon. Gentleman wrote his party's last manifesto, and now he does not stand by a word of it.

Tony Blair: Yes. Of course we do. That is why, after the chief executive of the agency resigned, we tried to ensure that the money was paid through to people. It will be extremely important to ensure that the changes that have been made over the past few months are kept going so that people receive the payments to which they are due.

Menzies Campbell: The Prime Minister knows that this arises not just from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. There is trouble at the Home Office and, from today's report from the King's Fund, there is trouble in the national health service. Following the right hon. Gentleman's reshuffle, does he accept that the people of the United Kingdom are much more likely to be motivated by appreciation of the Government's performance rather than by personalities? Does he accept also that his Ministers will be judged by their achievements, not their preference for him or the Chancellor of the Exchequer? When will the Prime Minister do something about the NHS, about DEFRA and about the Home Office?

Tony Blair: Difficult changes are being put in place in the health service, but the important thing is that we achieve our target of an 18-week maximum wait not just for in-patients but for out-patients. That is revolutionising the national health service, and it means that people can book an appointment. It builds on the fact that we used to have hundreds of thousands of people waiting more than six months for an in-patient appointment, and we do not any more. People used to wait years for simple operations such as operations for cataracts, but they do not do so now. It builds on the fact that we have something in the region of 85,000 extra nurses in the national health service. That is a pretty good list of achievements, and I thank the right hon. and learned Gentleman for giving me the opportunity to say so.

Tony Blair: The point that my hon. Friend makes is very important indeed. There will be negotiations so that we can achieve a treaty, hopefully at the United Nations General Assembly this autumn. That was raised not just during our European Union presidency but at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting. We are in touch, too, with all those people in civic society who have led the campaign, and I very much hope that we will secure a treaty that is sufficiently effective to include all the major arms-exporting states. This is not just about constraining illegitimate sales of defence equipment but about tackling illicit and irresponsible transfers particularly, as he said, of small arms, which do so much damage and tragically kill so many people in Africa.

Tony Blair: I entirely understand my hon. Friend's concern in respect of the issue that he raises. There are about 25,000 deaths a year from thromboembolism. It is a serious issue, as he rightly implies, that requires comprehensive action. Following the report last year of the Select Committee on Health, the Department of Health established an independent expert working group which will report to the chief medical officer. Recommendations will be made by the summer, so within the next few weeks we will be in a position to say what more we can do to try and tackle the problem.

Greg Clark: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. Two weeks ago, I raised a point of order to register my concern that information was given to the press that had been alleged in an answer to a parliamentary as being unavailable. You kindly advised me, Mr. Speaker, to resubmit that question and I was concerned when on 3 May, that question was answered with a holding reply, saying that the question would be answered shortly by the Minister with responsibility for planning. Since I am asking for information that has already been given to the press, surely it is a discourtesy bordering on contempt for Parliament that that information is not available immediately. Will you advise me what steps I can take to have that information provided to the House?

REGULATION OF MORTGAGE REPOSSESSIONS

George Mudie: I beg to move,
	That leave be given to bring in a Bill to provide that the repossession of residential property may be sought only under certain conditions; and for connected purposes.
	Last year, 10,250 owners had their homes repossessed as a result of mortgage arrears. That figure, which amounts to more than 200 properties a week, was more than 60 per cent. up on the previous year and that upward trend is forecast to continue. It is lower than in the peak years of the late 1980s and early 1990s, but it is worrying and is only the tip of the iceberg, as the number of owners actually served with a court order can be more than 10 times that number. In most cases, the matter is settled before court and some have the order suspended, but the process of court action or even the threat of court action is traumatic to most of the people involved. The Council of Mortgage Lenders complacently states that the numbers, although rising, are below record levels, but that ignores the devastating effects on the families concerned, particularly the children.
	Before I detail those effects, I must make the point that the Bill is not a measure to protect those who can pay but, for their own reasons, fail to do so. It is designed to protect those who are hit by circumstances outwith their control that make it difficult for them to meet their mortgage payments.
	Anyone can be hit by unemployment, ill health and temporary loss of income, but their situation, given understanding by the lender, can be recovered. It is fair to say that in the majority of cases, particularly with the more responsible lenders, good sense and flexibility mean that the problem is worked out to the satisfaction of both parties. However, it is recognised that many lenders do not show the necessary patience and good will, and court action for repossession is sought prematurely. It is also notable that where a borrower is dealing with a bank on their own, the voluntary mortgage code is not always adhered to. Amazingly, much better sense is shown when bodies such as citizens advice bureaux become involved.
	I should also say a word about insurance, which at first glance can be suggested as an easy solution. A large proportion of the properties involved are right-to-buy properties at the cheaper end of the market. Here, every penny counts with the borrowers, and most find insurance too expensive. Moreover, as is sadly the case with so many insurance products, the exclusions in the policies often make them of little use.
	All Members will have had constituents who have endured the process, and may not need reminding of the damage done to families. Nevertheless, I should like to place on the record some details of a Rowntree Trust report on the social consequences of mortgage repossession for parents and their children. The repossession hit six main areas of people's lives: it altered their social status and identity, adversely affected personal and family relationships, affected their health and well-being, damaged their quality of life, destroyed future aspirations, and caused real problems for their children. Taking only three of those areas, the study lists the ways in which, for example, family relationships were affected. It found marital breakdown, arguments, inability to invest trust in the partner perceived responsible, and parenting difficulties. It noted poor physical health, poor mental health, stress and depression. For children, it found problems with loss of friends, different schools, bad health and, understandably, emotional insecurity.
	In the light of the continuing rise in the number of repossessions, the questionable and somewhat arbitrary behaviour of lenders, and the huge personal cost to the borrowers, as well as the social costs to us all, the Bill seeks to strengthen and rationalise the regulation of mortgage repossessions. It would ensure that irresponsible lending had to be taken into account when repossession was sought. No one wants to inhibit the flexibility of banks, but if things go wrong, the lending history should be a factor in deciding whether repossession is warranted.
	As has been found necessary in other areas of financial life, there should be one regulator. Some loans are currently regulated by the Financial Services Authority under its mortgages regime; others are regulated by the Office of Fair Trading under the new consumer credit legislation. In the eyes of professionals in the industry, that is leading to confusion and difficulty. The Bill would establish a single regulatory regime for secured loan products. There would be a requirement that repossession should not be sought when there is a given level of equity in the property. I recently had a case where one of the major high street banks was seeking repossession for debts totalling less than £5,000 pounds, yet there was £90,000 equity in the property. Clearly, there was no need for that bank to race to court under those circumstances.
	Under the Bill, the length of time a borrower has been in the property would have to be considered by the court. Ironically, under current consumer credit legislation, a car that is bought by hire purchase cannot be repossessed once the borrower has made a certain number of payments, but that facility does not apply in the case of a home, which is more vital to every family.
	The Bill would force courts to take into consideration the damaging effects on children of a forced repossession. It would also seek to regularise the approach of local councils, which often, regardless of a date being give for eviction, refuse to consider the family for alternative housing until the actual eviction has taken place, thus making hostel accommodation unavoidable.
	As the National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux pointed out, some lenders take court action for possession too quickly and with too little regard to good arrears practice or the costs and consequences of such actions for the borrower. The Bill would introduce a pre-court protocol for mortgage repossessions in keeping with the broad strategy of the Department for Constitutional Affairs for reducing unnecessary court action. It would also be modelled on the pre-court protocol for rent arrears possessions that the Department is currently developing.
	The measures are all designed to strengthen the regulations so that innocent, hard-working people who have a temporary setback can be given every opportunity to keep the family home together and, when appropriate and by agreement, make good the default. The best building societies do that in the main, but sadly, there are people in the industry who ignore the voluntary mortgage code and needlessly destroy people's lives.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	Bill ordered to be brought in by Mr. George Mudie, Mr. Kevan Jones, Mr. Phil Willis, Mr. Andrew Love, Mr. Jim Cunningham, Bob Spink, Mr. Elfyn Llwyd, Helen Jones, Colin Burgon, Mr. Nicholas Brown, Mr. Ian Austin and Alan Keen.

Regulation of Mortgage Repossessions

As amended in the Committee, considered.

Liam Byrne: I shall first deal briefly with the Government amendments.
	Government amendment No. 75 is consequential to new clause 4. As hon. Members know, police authorities can delegate powers to construct committees but only those that are organised across the entire geography of a region. New clause 4 and the associated amendment No. 75 will enable police authorities to delegate their functions either to a member of the authority or to an area committee of the authority. They would therefore provide police authorities with the flexibility to establish area committees and delegate some of their functions to such committees. That is important in the context of combined working with local authorities.
	Government amendment No. 64 and the associated consequential amendments will enable police authorities to appoint more than one individual to the office of deputy chief constable when there is a compelling operational case for that. I have tabled the amendments to enable police authorities to delegate to area committees in response to strong representations by my hon. Friends the Members for Wrexham (Ian Lucas), for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami), for Clwyd, South (Mr. Jones), for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane) and for Ynys Môn (Albert Owen). They have made the powerful case that, in the light of the special circumstances in Wales—including its geography and its transport infrastructure—an all-Wales police force could require more than one deputy chief constable and more than one police authority area committee.
	Amendments Nos. 54 and 59 are technical. They reproduce the existing order-making power in schedule 3 to the Police Act 1996 that enables the Secretary of State to make regulations on the procedures to be followed by selection panels charged with identifying candidates for appointment as independent members of police authorities.
	Amendments Nos. 55 to 58 and 60 to 63 correct a drafting error in the Bill to provide for the appointment of a chairman and one or more vice-chairmen from the membership of a police authority, as is presently set out in the Police Act 1996.
	Amendments Nos. 2 to 13, tabled by the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Lynne Featherstone), relate to the election of police authority chairmen and vice-chairmen. I can assure the House that we have no intention of exercising the regulation-making power in schedule 2 to provide for the Home Secretary to appoint chairs or vice-chairs of police authorities. Our aim is simply to give a greater measure of flexibility in the legislation in relation to the appointment of police authorities as a whole. Our proposal is therefore very straightforward: we propose to exercise the regulation-making power so as to provide that the chair and vice-chair of police authorities outside London will, as now, be appointed by the members of the authority. In the case of the Metropolitan Police Authority, we have consulted on a proposal that the Mayor of London should appoint the chairman. We are considering the responses to the consultation and will announce our conclusions in the summer.
	My right hon. Friend the Member for Salford (Hazel Blears), now the Minister without Portfolio, said in Committee that candidates for chairmanships should have the right skills for the job. That was outlined clearly in the White Paper, "Building Communities, Beating Crime". We intend that candidates for the role of chair should be subject to a competency-based selection process. As in other areas, we will consult on the detailed provisions to be included in the regulations. In the light of my assurances on this issue, I hope that the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green will agree not to press her amendments.
	I turn now to amendments Nos. 14 to 20. I believe that the House is united in its ambition to ensure that recent improvements in police performance continue, and even accelerate. We all know that, in the real world, the prospect of outside intervention can be a great motivator for change.

Liam Byrne: I will come to the question of amalgamations shortly.
	In Committee, many hon. Members accepted the principle that powers of last resort to intervene should exist, providing the Secretary of State with the means to take remedial action where significant and enduring performance failings had been identified. These revisions are about ensuring that the powers are quickly usable. Sometimes a measure of speed is essential if the public are to secure the protection that they need, and that they pay for. Intervention powers are, and will remain, powers of last resort, and the revisions are not intended to change that.
	The amendments tabled by the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green—who is not in her place—seek to insert a number of unnecessary obstacles in the legislation. For example, amendment No. 14 seeks to remove all the proposed changes to the intervention powers. This overlooks the key role that intervention powers play in driving up police performance, and the changes needed to make them fit for purpose. Amendments Nos. 15 to 18 seek to reinsert the requirement that intervention will only be undertaken following a recommendation from the chief inspector for justice, community safety and custody or, as the new legislation provides, a recommendation from the police authority responsible for maintaining the police force. Enabling the Secretary of State to draw on the advice of a wider range of sources when considering intervention will mean that a wider base of knowledge on which to base an intervention decision is possible. That might include a recommendation from the inspectorate, for example, but experience has shown that a wider range of sources of information exist, such as a public inquiry—on Second Reading, my right hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, South (Mr. Clarke) mentioned the Bichard inquiry. There is every expectation that the inspectorate's opinion on whether to intervene would remain a central consideration. It is right, however, that other sources of information are not precluded from informing that decision.
	Amendments Nos. 19 and 20 seek to remove the Secretary of State's ability to intervene without delay when he is satisfied that the chief officer or chair of the police authority has been given sufficient information and time to remedy those failings. When a police force or police authority has failed to address problems of which it has been made aware, and it has already been given time to address them, surely a different solution needs to apply. Where a long-standing and known performance issue has persisted and gone unresolved, we therefore feel that it would be illogical, and possibly irresponsible, simply to hand back the problem to the force or authority without any stronger or more immediate requirement for its resolution. I therefore hope that the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green will not press her amendments on those provisions.
	Amendment No. 82, tabled by the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (David Davis), requires that referendums are held before an order can be made under section 32 of the Police Act 1996 altering police force areas. I appreciate that a process of permanent revisionism is now taking hold on the Conservative Benches, but the amendment ignores the adequate provisions already in the Police Act for merging force areas. Indeed, those very provisions were substantially revised by the previous Administration in the Police and Magistrates' Courts Act 1994, when the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) was Home Secretary.

Mark Pritchard: Is not the answer to my hon. Friend's question that many police forces have undertaken their own market research surveys? In West Mercia, for example, more than 80 per cent. of local people do not want their constabulary merged with other forces. The reason why the Government will not have a referendum on the matter is that they already know that the answer from the overwhelming majority of people around the nation is a resounding no.

Liam Byrne: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that intervention, but two issues need teasing apart. First, there is the report from Her Majesty's inspectorate that says that the current structure of forces does not provide sufficient resilience or protective services to deal with level two crime. As he will know, organised crime is at work in our communities, especially in relation to drugs, and that requires greater resilience. Secondly, one of the purposes of this place is to consider the sort of changes now proposed.

Liam Byrne: I will just finish this point.
	Secondly, on the role of the House, I want to answer directly the point about referendums. As the House knows, the process is that the Home Secretary must give notice of his intention to merge forces, and then there is a period of four months for the submission of objections. The Home Secretary must then consider those objections and respond to them before orders are made. Where a merger proposal is initiated by the Home Secretary—this is the most important point for the House—the necessary order is subject to the affirmative procedure, so that there is a debate and vote in both Houses.
	I am not sure that it is time to allow the new revisionism to run riot in the way that is proposed. I am a great advocate of direct democracy, probably more so than philosophers such as Michael Oakeshott or Edmund Burke. There is a place for referendums, and in our parliamentary system they should be reserved for major issues of constitutional significance, such as devolution and our future relationship with the European Union. It is for the House to deliberate and decide.

Liam Byrne: I will do so in a moment.
	The amendment tabled by the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden contains a number of interesting features, which also compel me to urge the House to reject it. First, it would require a referendum even when police authorities concerned have volunteered to merge. As you know, Mr. Speaker, I am a keen reader of the  Yorkshire Post, and I therefore read with interest the article by Simon McGee on 26 April. I noticed that the North Yorkshire police authority, for example, had voted in favour of a merger. I understand that the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron), who is not in his place, supported that decision, and said that,
	"if individual police forces and individual councillors want to campaign for amalgamations they're absolutely free to."
	He continued:
	"That's actually what devolution should be all about."
	The effect of the amendment, however, would be to deny that.
	Secondly, the amendment requires that the Home Secretary, affected police authorities and the Electoral Commission must agree the wording, which leaves open the question of what would happen if they could not agree. Finally, the amendment requires majority votes in each of the affected areas, which is an odd form of democracy, because if two out of three areas said yes, but a smaller one, perhaps with the minority of the population, said no, it would effectively be able to exercise a veto.

Owen Paterson: The Minister has mentioned the Home Secretary's role a couple of times. As we know, the Home Secretary represents a Scottish seat, and has no remit for policing in Scotland.
	Interestingly, a vigorous debate took place in the Labour party in Scotland. A party insider said
	"We want police forces to be more accountable to the communities they serve."
	The breaking up of Strathclyde police is being discussed where the Home Secretary has no remit. Then the Home Secretary comes down to England and tells our constituents, who massively oppose larger police forces, that they may be given them.
	What is the Home Secretary's real opinion? On his home patch, his own party is debating the breaking up of a very large police force. Now he has come down here—he has only been in power over the past few days—and I should like to know his real views. Is he going to listen to us? Is he going to listen to our constituents? Is he going to let people have a referendum where there is huge local opposition to this measure?

Nick Herbert: Again, I think it unacceptable that that amount will be taken from the police capital budget and used for an amalgamation that the local force does not want, the police authority does not want and people in Essex do not want.
	In 2004, a leaked joint Home Office strategy unit report warned
	"Evidence from other sectors suggests that merger can be a costly, protracted exercise which does not always deliver expected benefits and inevitably causes distraction for management and staff".
	In a letter published this week in  The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent and  The Times, a group of cross-party chairmen of police authorities representing Cheshire, Cleveland, Northamptonshire, North Wales and West Mercia police authorities added to that warning, pointing out:
	"The current proposals are being rushed through amid concern that they will lead to a damaging reduction in performance, a collapse in neighbourhood policing and a significant loss of accountability. Serious questions remain about the costs and financing of mergers, the impact on council tax, the timescales for transition and the governance arrangements."

Stewart Jackson: My hon. Friend is being very generous in giving way. Does he agree that the Government could have met their financial objectives, which were set from the O'Connor report onwards, had they not so obviously set their face against federated arrangements such as those offered by the Cambridgeshire and Suffolk police authorities, and that they could have made financial cuts without affecting front-line operational services?

Nick Herbert: I understand, from all the public opinion polls and surveys that have been conducted in Wales and debates in which I have taken part, that there is considerable opposition in Wales to an all-Wales police force. There will be a substantial loss of accountability, because police force headquarters will be a long way from the people of north Wales. That is why there has been such resistance to the proposals. The hon. Gentleman is right to say that we need to listen to the people, and they are telling us that they do not want these amalgamations.
	Ministers claim that the powers in schedule 2 will be used as a last resort. That is what the Minister just told us and the explanatory notes to the Bill set it out in terms. But in Committee the Government refused to put the words on the face of the Bill. When they could offer no convincing reason for not including that uncomplicated safeguard, we became convinced that Ministers have every intention of using the powers more broadly. For that reason, we support amendments Nos. 15 to 18 tabled by the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Lynne Featherstone), which will go some way to restoring the balance by requiring that intervention is preceded by a recommendation from the new combined inspectorate, or a request from the police authority. Those are not unnecessary obstacles, as the Minister described them. They are the existing safeguards in legislation against the abuse of power by the Home Secretary and this Bill would remove them.
	The Association of Police Authorities has expressed alarm that the Bill
	"amounts to a fundamental shift of power to the Home Secretary, which undermines the checks and safeguards on which policing is built."
	It warns that that the
	"changes will not only further centralise power...but could also exacerbate the disconnection from local communities that restructuring policing into larger units could involve".
	The association's concern might well have increased if it had heard, as I have, a rumour of a new proposal to create a national policing board in the Home Office, to be chaired by the Home Secretary. There is nothing in the Bill about such a board. Nor, to my knowledge, has it been suggested in Parliament. Perhaps the Minister will now confirm whether such a board is planned. If so, it should have been discussed when this Bill was before the House. It is especially relevant to the powers in schedule 2 and the amendments before us, because the concept epitomises the direction of Government policy and the increasingly central direction of policing. We will have half the number of forces, remote from their local communities, with chief constables effectively being appointed by and answering to the Home Secretary. The public simply have not been consulted about a fundamental transfer of power from their communities. That is what our amendment, requiring local referendums on the changes, seeks to address. It is right in principle and it is right because we believe in trusting people. I beg to move amendment No. 82.

Ian Lucas: I support the Government amendments, in particular new clause 4 and amendment No. 64.
	The proposals to set up an all-Wales police force have been extremely controversial in Wales, especially in north Wales. North Wales Labour MPs have been listening closely to their constituents' views about the proposals and were regularly in close and active discussions with my hon. Friend the Minister's predecessor, the right hon. Member for Salford (Hazel Blears), who is now the Minister without Portfolio, and the previous Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, South (Mr. Clarke). We look forward to continuing those discussions with my hon. Friend. I have already benefited from several talks with him.
	Much of the reason for the strength of the controversy in north Wales is that we are extremely proud of our local police force. We have one of the lowest crime rates in the UK and one of the highest detection rates. A person who commits a crime in north Wales is more likely to be caught. North Wales police force is such a good force because of legislation introduced by the Labour Government. The Crime and Disorder Act 1998 was the most successful, far-sighted and effective legislation on policing since the second world war. It has made policing local.
	If Opposition Members had an active and close relationship with their local police forces they would know that with the advent of community safety partnerships, co-operation between local authorities and police forces has developed hugely since 1997 under the Labour Government.

Ian Lucas: My hon. Friend presages many of the remarks that I intend to make. The amendments represent progress, but they are not the result that I, as a north Wales Member of Parliament, seek. I accept that there is a recognition that governance issues are extremely important in Wales, because of the peculiar geographical circumstances in Wales and the practical difficulties of improving level 2 policing in Wales, given the country's identity and geography. However, the financing of policing in Wales is crucial.
	Since 1997 there has been investment in creating the community policing teams that have been so effective in improving both the performance and my constituents' perception of the North Wales police force. The concern is that if a reorganisation takes place, the progress that has been achieved will be undermined by the transfer of the funding that north Wales police currently receive away from north Wales to other areas of Wales, which currently have lower performance, lower detection rates and higher crime. An all-Wales police authority, most of whose members are likely to come from south Wales, will be tempted to shift resources away from north Wales to south Wales.

Ian Lucas: My hon. Friend the Minister has been in his current position for four days, as has his boss, the new Home Secretary. I am sure that there will be a period of reflection in the Home Office. I am sure that the difficult practical issues that I am raising will be looked at closely by the Home Office and that, to satisfy me, they must make proposals to ensure that the current financing for north Wales police is maintained.

John Maples: We have just had a 25-minute debate on community policing in north Wales in the middle of a debate on the reorganisation of police forces across the country—I would like to drag the debate back to that broader subject. I want to speak in support of Amendment No. 82. I am not, in general, in favour of referendums. I take the points that the Minister made and I think that, on the whole, Governments should make those decisions and then be responsible to the House and to the electorate for them. However, in this case there has been so little consultation and consideration of the alternatives that a referendum may be one of the only ways in which we can air matters.
	The former Home Secretary had made up his mind what he wanted to do. The regional agenda was at work and he was not prepared to entertain the concept of the federalisation of forces or of having multi-level, two-tier police forces. I was told that very early on by one of the Ministers concerned—I was told not to bother to write about that. Within days of the so-called consultation period finishing, the Home Office had reduced our options in the west midlands to two—and it made it very clear that it did not like one of them. There has not been a proper consultation.
	On the question of referendums and the Conservatives, when police forces were last reorganised—this is a once in a generation thing and it is important that we get it right, because Governments of different political colours will have to live with the arrangement—there was a royal commission and all the different options were studied. I do not know whether we came to the right conclusion, but nobody could pretend that there was not a full consultation and examination of the alternatives, which there has not been in this case.  [ Interruption. ] I was in favour of a referendum on the European constitution—that is perfectly true. So, in the end, was the Prime Minister.
	I realise that there is a trade-off, which the Home Office is trying to deal with, between the need for high-tech intelligence-led modern policing to deal with the professional criminal gangs, serious crime such as armed robbery, and terrorism, and the need for local community policing, which is what most of our constituents want and feel that they do not get. I can see the argument that, at a big regional level, a West Midlands police force with 15,000 police constables will be able to have dedicated units to deal with drugs, organised crime, armed robbery and terrorism, whereas that cannot be done on an amalgamation basis or by having one police force taking the lead. On the other hand, there is no doubt that a police force such as Warwickshire, with 1,000 policemen, will provide a far greater level of local accountability and community policing that would be the case if it were part of the West Midlands force. I am concerned about that.
	The good thing about the old arrangement was local accountability and community policing in rural areas. The bad thing was the lack of resilience. If a couple of murders occurred in Warwickshire, until they were sorted out, that was the end of about half of the community policing. Under the new arrangements, those good and bad aspects are reversed. The arrangements will be good for serious crime and resilience, but bad for local policing and accountability. We need to consider another way of dealing with the matter.
	I hope that the Minister will be able to address my specific concerns when he sums up. First, the high levels of crime in the conurbation of the west midlands—the Birmingham conurbation—will suck police forces out of rural areas. That seems inevitable. The problems that are faced in the conurbation areas will always result in higher crime rates than in rural areas. I do not see how there will be protection. I would be grateful if he could reassure me about that.
	Secondly, there is the issue of accountability. Warwickshire police force is accountable to one county council, five district councils, five crime and disorder reduction partnerships and five Members of Parliament. If I want to speak to the chief constable, it is very easy, and, to be frank, there are so few of us that he has to take my call, but in the case of the West Midlands police force, there will be about 70 Members of Parliament, about 14,000 policemen and about 32 basic command units. He will be as far from rural Warwickshire, or rural Staffordshire, or rural Shropshire—both in his head and geographically—as it is possible to be. He is going to say, "Gee, they don't have any problems in south Warwickshire. Crime there is half the rate it is in Wolverhampton. I am worrying about Wolverhampton." There must be some accountability in relation to the basic command unit.
	Thirdly, we do not have the ability to manage forces of that size. I know that the Met is held up an example and I think that the police force is quite strong on leadership in some areas, but it is not particularly good on management. It is a feature of the public sector that it does not appreciate or put into operation a distinction between leadership and management. The management of a force of 14,000 policemen and probably 6,000 or 7,000 civilians is a really big task. We have not proved at all that we are up to that. I am concerned that the Government never allowed us to examine the two-tier option. We could have done, because it exists in many other countries. France and the United States are two examples. We could have had a West Midlands police force that dealt with big serious crimes and strategic issues, built in the necessary resilience, and dealt with terrorism, intelligence, and serious and organised crime. We could also have kept a Warwickshire police force, and other county forces, to deal with community policing.
	The police say that there would be a problem of interaction between the two forces. That is true, but that exists at the moment between head office and basic command units. That would be a small price to pay for getting the two objectives that we want. The Government want a high level force to work well, but are sacrificing the value of community policing and community accountability at a lower level. A two-tier force would at least have given us the best of both those worlds and it would have been worth examining the issue of the weaknesses in communication—often clues about big, serious, organised crime are picked up at local levels by community officers. That would have been a smaller price to pay than the one that we are paying in the Government's reorganisation proposals. I bitterly regret that we were never given the opportunity to consult on that. We should have been, because, as I say, we are reorganising the forces for a generation.
	I hope that the Minister can deal with the question of community accountability at a basic command unit level, or some other level that means something—rather than just having a dotted line that involves going along and talking to the district council once every three months. There should be a real obligation to take notice of what locally elected politicians and communities want.
	The resources for community policing in rural areas should be protected from the demands and inevitable predations of policing and crime problems in urban areas. We all pay our taxes. The transition costs in the West Midlands are estimated to be £50 million and the annual savings £30 million. When I wrote to the Minister's predecessor, I was told that part of the police's capital budget for those two years had been set aside to pay for that. I am glad that the money is not coming out of the current budget, because then it would be a long time before we saw the benefit of any savings, but I am concerned that the money is coming out of the capital budget. Will the Minister tell us exactly what that means? Does is mean that the police will not be able buy computers, fingerprint kits and police cars, or whatever else they need to buy out of their capital budgets, or that criminal justice centres will be set back?
	Finally, I would like some reassurance that the police precepts, which tend to be higher in rural than urban areas, will be allowed to find an average level without that being rigged. There will have to be one police precept across the west midlands under the new arrangements. Given that that will benefit rural areas—almost uniquely in the context of anything that the Government have done in that respect for nine years—I suspect that local authority finance will be rigged to take that benefit away so that we will lose grant to make up for the fact that we have had our police precept reduced. I would like some reassurance on that, too.

Frank Cook: It is always a pleasure to listen to the hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Mr. Maples) and I always enjoy doing so, but, in following him, I realise that I have to try to match his eloquence. That is somewhat difficult, especially as I approach this issue with a very heavy heart.
	I apologise for arriving late in the Chamber. I had a huge backlog of admin work to do because I was in Committee all day yesterday, from morning till night, as the senior Chairman of the Standing Committee on the Education and Inspections Bill. I have to return to Committee very soon, so I will be making a bit of a breathless contribution to the debate. I want to complain not about policing standards, or police conduct and discipline, but the reorganisation.
	The matter is nothing new to the House because I secured an Adjournment debate on it in Westminster Hall. It was probably the most heavily attended debate on any subject discussed in Westminster Hall, and I must say that I enjoyed it. I spoke for rather too long, but nevertheless the subjects were covered in adequate detail.
	I point out to the Minister and the Government that ever since the topic came on the agenda and we were given three weeks in which to consider the proposal and come up with our options, I have consistently opposed it resolutely, in every syllable. I made the previous Home Secretary well aware of my opposition not only through the debate in Westminster Hall, but in private meetings with him and when he chose to raise the issue with me in the Tea Room—I did not chase him; he came to me. On each and every occasion, I had to make it plain to him and his then Minister of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford (Hazel Blears), that I thought that the proposal was unjustified, unwarranted, illogical and unaffordable.
	I am not against change to the structure of the police force. Modernisation is certainly needed, as are re-equipping and new methods of detection and pursuit, especially to take account of the changes that are occurring in not only terrorism, but drug and commercial crime. However, simply coming up with a set of proposals, giving people three weeks to consider them, stating that options could be put forward, but sweeping those options to one side without even considering them, was not only illogical and impolite, but verging on the insane.
	I find it difficult to express myself in terms that are clear and polite. We were asked to concentrate on forces that would be able to supply 4,000 officers. When one questioned the basis for that figure, no logical justification was given. One then pointed out that there are forces in Scotland—they will not be affected by the measure because it will not impinge on Scotland at all, which must be rather comforting for a Home Secretary who comes from Scotland—with only 400 officers, so how are they going to survive and provide protective services if we must have forces with 4,000 officers in this country?

Owen Paterson: It is a great honour and a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Stockton, North (Frank Cook). He made a second powerful speech, and spoke extremely well when he landed his debate in Westminster Hall.
	I endorse virtually everything that he has said today. He may have been out of the Chamber when I intervened on the matter of Scotland, but the situation is rather worse than the hon. Gentleman thinks. A report in  Scotland on Sunday suggested that party insiders are saying that the enormous Strathclyde police force may be broken up because, according to certain members of the Labour party, it is not close enough to the community. We are subject to the extraordinary constitutional outrage of a Home Secretary from Scotland, who has no remit whatsoever for the Strathclyde police force, dictating to us—in the north-east in the hon. Gentleman's case, or to the West Mercia force in mine—and forcing a massively unpopular amalgamation when his own party is doing exactly the opposite, back in his own home patch. On those grounds alone, this process is illegitimate and the Government should think again.
	The process is illegitimate also, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Mr. Maples) has said, because of the outrageous rush with which it has been conducted. On 16 September, Her Majesty's inspectorate of constabulary published the report entitled "Closing the Gap", which referred to the utterly arbitrary figure of 4,000 police officers.
	My parliamentary neighbour, the hon. Member for Wrexham (Ian Lucas), was talking about resources. The issue is not all about resources, but some of us are caught financially. I am not making a call for more money, but it should be noted that West Mercia constabulary receives £94.38 per head from central Government while North Wales police receives £116. If West Mercia received the same as North Wales, our force would be well over 4,000 strong. If that were so, I would probably not be speaking in this debate, because there would not be an issue to discuss. As we have only 2,380 officers, we are, however, caught by the absurd black-and-white figure of 4,000, for which there is no basis.
	The West Mercia force has a splendid chief constable in Paul West. As the hon. Member for Stockton, North said, he was given a hard time last night on television, but really stood up for himself. There is also a strong police authority under Paul Deneen. The force polices a huge area—Shropshire, Worcestershire and Herefordshire. Despite the low rate of funding per head from central Government, when the HMIC base-line assessment and the police standards unit assessment of performance is taken into account, which includes level 2 performance—it must be the most comprehensive independent assessment of police forces, which took place in the autumn—West Mercia was rated as the No. 1 police force in the country. In terms of geographical area, that force is responsible for the fourth largest in the country. Yet we are to be rushed headlong, helter-skelter, into an amalgamation with Warwickshire, Staffordshire and the West Midlands force.
	A document was issued on 16 September, and the Home Secretary wrote to the police authority on 22 September saying, in effect, "You have got to be amalgamated and 4,000 is the limit." I have been involved in this matter and meetings took place down here. For instance, I got the chief constable and the chairman to meet the then Parliamentary Under-Secretary, the hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart). Our chief constable was pretty straight with the hon. Lady and told her that it was nothing short of scandalous to reconfigure British policing in a few weeks. He said to her, directly:
	"In my professional judgment as a Chief of a high-performing force"—
	he was being modest because it is the highest-performing force—
	"in a regional structure it would be extremely difficult to give the same level of performance as at present in West Mercia."
	To touch on my political neighbour's comments on local policing, the chief constable said:
	"BCU commanders will have much less influence. The proposal is untested and the regional model is not supported by the people of West Mercia. The way it is being imposed is outrageous; there is scant regard for professional advice on the ground."
	Most importantly, the chief constable said:
	"Level 2 could be delivered by collaboration and joint working."
	As an example with regard to level 2, West Mercia officers are not only helping the West Midlands force after the incident at Lozells last year but helping the Met following the bombings last year. West Mercia officers are also in the Balkans helping authorities there. There must be collaboration across forces and we support that, but that does not mean subordination and a complete loss of the relationship between the smaller local force and the people.
	In the Westminster Hall debate—

Owen Paterson: I was pursuing another profession at the time of the miners' strike and I am not qualified to speak about that. However, I am sure that there was collaboration. I am sure also that the hon. Gentleman makes a valid point. There has always been collaboration between forces. The issue has been made even more pertinent following the arrival of the Serious Organised Crime Agency, as my hon. Friend the Member for The Wrekin (Mark Pritchard) said. SOCA is carrying out level 2 strategic work on terrorism, so there is no need to go through this massively expensive and unpopular process of amalgamation. Local policing should be as near as possible to local people.
	As a final crushing comment, Paul West said:
	"This is not some superficial numbers game. The analysis of 4,000, if written by a GCSE statistics student, would have been returned."
	That is the opinion of the professional. I repeat that that is the view of the chief constable of the No. 1 police force in the country. His view on statistics were supported by Tony Lawrance, who is professor of statistics at the university of Warwick. He published a statistically based opinion which completely undermined the HMIC review, which is the only basis for the figure of 4,000.
	I suggest that professors of statistics are not commonly known for colourful or exciting language, but I shall give a flavour of one of Tony Lawrance's comments. He said:
	"This is an almost perfect example of how not to present a graph— no scales on either axis, no data plotted to justify the lines drawn. It is almost impossible to obtain any critical understanding from it, except that it is intended to prove that score for protective capability increases with force size...I can see little hard evidence in pages 30 and 31 to justify the figure of 4,000."
	Touching on collaboration, that professor of statistics went on to say:
	"Effectiveness of smaller forces depends on arrangements they have to deal with policing matters which outstretch their resources, by collaboration with adjacent forces. If these are good then they are effective. This would apply to the larger forces and the most serious matters needing massive response."
	That is exactly as was cited.

Owen Paterson: No, the professor's analysis was purely of the HMIC report. Given that it is constantly thrown at us as the justification for a revolution in British policing, it is pertinent that a politically neutral professor of statistics rubbishes the data. Even though he uses such extraordinarily colourful language, the Government continue to produce that report as evidence.
	Given that basic evidence and given that it is extremely unpopular, the proposal is illegitimate. The Prime Minister said before the Liaison Committee:
	"the reorganisation of local police is something where it really is sensible to listen to local people."
	On 18 January, he said:
	"It is important that we listen to local people, and I can assure the hon. Gentleman that we will do so."—[ Official Report, 18 January 2006; Vol. 441, c. 836.]
	A week later, on 25 January, he said:
	"Obviously, we will listen carefully to what people say.
	Later that day, he said:
	"I entirely accept that some people are in favour of mergers, that some are against them and that some are in between. We will have to take a decision on what is best for local forces, but we will do so listening to what local people say. In the end, surely, what we both want to see is the most effective form of policing."—[ Official Report, 25 January 2006; Vol. 441, c. 1426-29.]
	A comprehensive survey of public opinion has taken place in West Mercia. Not one of the area's 13 Members of Parliament wrote to the police authority to support the regional proposal, including a Parliamentary Private Secretary, the hon. Member for Worcester (Mr. Foster), who is now a Government Whip and, lo and behold, the right hon. Member for Redditch (Jacqui Smith), the Government Chief Whip. None of the county and unitary councils supports the measure, and neither do any of the nine district councils. None of the 108 parish and town councils support it, and neither do the 11 police consultative groups or 15 community groups. They all support the proposal that West Mercia should become a strategic force, achieving that rank using its own resources. In more than 100 public meetings, overwhelming support has been expressed for the proposal that West Mercia handle level 2 crimes.
	In a telephone poll, 94 per cent. of respondents were in favour of West Mercia promoting itself to level 2 within its own boundaries. Similarly, 96 per cent. of written responses supported West Mercia as a level 2 force. Why on earth do the Government think that the proposal, if it is rammed through, will be legitimate? The Minister effectively said that carefully selected Government toadies will have a little debate in a closed Statutory Instrument Committee, to enable the measure to go through.

Owen Paterson: That is a prescient intervention, as I was about to say that policing began as a civic duty in Elizabethan times. Then, as now, jury service was a civic duty and, the citizenry were also the police. My hon. Friend is right to raise the matter, because Sir Robert Peel's second principle stated that
	"the ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon the public approval of police...actions".
	Sir Robert continued:
	"Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public: the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent upon every citizen in the interest of community welfare and existence."
	In 1839, the royal commission on policing recommended that there should be a national police force, but that recommendation was rejected by Parliament, which understood that policing could only work with public support and co-operation.
	Having cited the figures, how can the Minister possibly believe that a new west midlands force will have any support or legitimacy, given the strength of public opinion? On 14 February, the West Mercia police authority unanimously rejected the merger proposal, and it supported my calls for the local referendum that is the subject amendment No. 82. Only yesterday, seven policy authority chairmen from all parties stated that opinion polls show overwhelming public opposition, and pointed out that only two police authorities have volunteered to proceed with mergers. Some of them have initiated legal proceedings to halt the process; West Mercia will pursue the legal avenues against the measure, and it will seek judicial review at every stage. Last night, the chief constable appeared on "HARDtalk", and gave a robust defence in the face of probing questions from Stephen Sackur.

Owen Paterson: My hon. Friend is quite right—there will chaos when the proposal is introduced. On the television last night, my chief constable made the point that there will be only one winner. There will be only one chief constable and one deputy, so four good deputies and four good chief constables will be fired. The police will lose a huge swathe of experience across the country, as chief constables, their deputies and other senior personnel such as financial staff will go. It is an extraordinary act of vandalism to get rid of that talent, given that SOCA, which should handle level 2 crime, only began its operations April, and that forces such as West Mercia have proved that they can handle level 2 crime.
	This is a bizarre story, as the hon. Member for Stockton, North said. The measure was rushed through at a week's notice on the basis of a bogus report and utterly false statistics that have been rubbished. It will be rammed through in my area in the face of extraordinary public opinion—I have cited opposition of 94 and 96 per cent. It lacks legitimacy and it has been rammed through in the teeth of professional advice from the most successful chief constable in the country and from police chairmen, who have made it clear that they will take legal action against the Government. To suggest that it can be introduced without a local referendum is insane, so I support amendment No. 82.

Stewart Jackson: This important issue has not received the airtime that it deserves. I shall confine my contribution to police structures. The Bill generally is a missed opportunity and will do nothing to tackle the underlying issue—the scourge of crime and disorder. The Prime Minister, we are told, is always looking for actions that will be his legacy. In the wake of the removal of the right hon. Member for Norwich, South (Mr. Clarke) from the post of Home Secretary, one could have been to listen to the massive opposition of people throughout the country to these ill thought-out proposals and to tackle the last bastion of restrictive practices, sclerotic working practices, bureaucracy, inefficiency and buck-passing. I am not speaking about ordinary policemen and women.
	Under the Bill, we are moving, although the Government would no doubt deny it, towards a national police force, entrenching central control by the Home Secretary and the Home Office and reducing local accountability, not least by changing the role and responsibilities of members of police authorities. Some of the proposals in the Bill begin to infringe on operational police matters.
	Through the Bill, we are embedding the general concept that senior police officers should be accountable upwards from their local area to the Home Office, not accountable downwards to residents, taxpayers, or even Members of Parliament and local elected councillors. We have strategic plans, police performance assessments, national policing plans, frameworks, the national policing improvement agency and so on. They are all part of a centralised, top-down, tick-box culture. The views of long-suffering residents are largely irrelevant. More importantly, the proposed reforms will have no discernible effect on the reduction of crime.
	Nothing so perfectly sums that up than the obdurate disdain for the views of local people that we have seen from the Government over the past six months. In the teeth of opposition from hon. Members in all parts of the House, not least hon. Members from north Wales and other Labour Members, the forced police amalgamation plans are unwanted and unworkable and are being foisted on local authorities by the departed right hon. Member for Norwich, South.
	I pay tribute to Cambridgeshire and Suffolk police authorities for refusing to be bullied into a so-called voluntary amalgamation. I commend to the House the views of Councillor Ian Bates, the leader of Huntingdonshire district council in Cambridgeshire, who challenged the Home Office unilaterally to submit its proposals for Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Norfolk to a plebiscite of local people, to gauge whether the Government have a mandate to wreck the police service in Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Norfolk. Like the councillor, I believe that the Government's plans are hasty, intellectually incoherent, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Shropshire (Mr. Paterson) said, and flawed.
	Councillor Bates asked some pertinent questions of the Home Office, which bear repetition. He pointed out that the amalgamations will detract from the ongoing operational improvements that we have seen in Cambridgeshire, such as Operation Harrier, a major drugs operation in Peterborough three years ago. The amalgamations will have a major impact on operational and financial risk. They will undermine the concept of neighbourhood policing. It is interesting that the Minister fought his own successful by-election campaign in Hodge Hill on neighbourhood policing and other policing issues, yet there is a dichotomy between neighbourhood policing and the drive towards regional government and regional policing, which he must know is motivating many of his hon. Friends to oppose the proposals.
	As I said earlier, morale is a major issue. Cambridgeshire could be construed as a failing authority, but we are through the worst, things are improving and the force has the strong leadership of Chief Constable Julie Spence. Yet all the senior officers in the three counties are now engaged in a game of musical chairs to try and get the best position. They are, therefore, focusing not on crime, but on new badges, new management suites, new structures and new buildings.
	Questions remain. Will the Home Office meet all the net costs associated with mergers? I listened to the Minister but I remain unconvinced by the damascene conversion. What will the impact be on my constituents' council tax bills? Will democratic and lay justice representation be the same in Cambridgeshire as in Norfolk and Suffolk, under the proposals? Will the Home Office grant remain the same to fund more police, community support officers and other specialist police operational needs, in 2007 and in 2008? We know that the Government are obsessed with change, reform and altering structures. There will inevitably be consultancy costs for the amalgamations and reorganisations. Who will pay them? I do not want the taxpayers in the Peterborough constituency to pay for the Government's administrative folly.
	I fear that the Bill focuses on structures and ignores people's everyday experience of crime and disorder. Last week I visited South Bretton, part of the Peterborough Development Corporation development in the west of my constituency, where residents were plagued by youth crime and appalling antisocial behaviour. They were miserable about that and about the response from the police. I am taking the matter up with the chief constable. One lady who works on the night shift in a local factory told me in tears that she fears coming home from her shift. She knows she will not sleep because she is worried about criminal damage, harassment and youth crime. Is that any way to live?
	What will be the outcome of the amalgamations? Will decent tax-paying people see a reduction in crime? Yes, we have action areas, a prolific and priority offender strategy, a joint working party locally, a safer schools partnership and a local respect action plan, and goodness me, there is a respect academy in the pipeline.

Stewart Jackson: My hon. Friend makes a good point. I am extremely concerned that we will see reductions in full-time police officer numbers in basic command units, as we have seen in Peterborough over the past three years. Fifty-two full-time police officers have been lost, and violent crime has risen from 2,761 offences in 2001 to 5,827 in 2005. In my basic command unit, detection rates are 15 per cent. for burglary, 28 per cent. for sexual offences and 20 per cent. for robbery. I worry that the democratic deficit that will be a consequence of huge regional police forces will mean that the particular policing needs of my constituency and other urban areas will be ignored, as will the specialist policing needs of rural areas under the new regional structure, as my hon. Friends have pointed out.
	The changes will do nothing to stop the erosion of people's faith in the criminal justice system. I make no bones about my views. In my maiden speech on 6 June last year, I called for an elected police official for Cambridgeshire. If such an official is called a sheriff, that is fine. I believe that that is important, because I believe that the democratic deficit must be filled.
	Accountability is needed not only on policing, but on prosecutions at a local level. I know that that issue is slightly different, but it relates to people's lack of faith in how structures work now. Council tax payers in the Peterborough unitary authority area now pay £46 a head for local policing compared with £20 a head in 1998, and I could entertain the House, if that is the right word, with many similar examples.
	The Bill reveals the Government's fetish for structures, rather than focusing on delivery of outcomes. The Government want to talk about structures and avoid real reform, and the police service needs real reform. We need proper accountability by means of an elected sheriff or similar official. We must reform the pay and conditions of police officers, which should relate to skills, competence and results in combating crime, rather than length of service, Buggins's turn or the canteen culture. Incidentally, I speak as the son of a policemen and as the brother of two policemen, one of whom is serving and the other of whom is an ex-policemen.
	We need to move away from situations in which policemen have two jobs.

Simon Burns: With respect, I will not. This debate has been going on for almost two hours, but the hon. Gentleman has hardly been present in the Chamber.
	Despite all the representations and wishes of the local community, the Government refuse to listen and allow Essex to remain as a stand-alone force. That has confused many people in Essex, because the next-door county, Kent, has been allowed to remain as a stand-alone police authority, as has Hampshire. I would be grateful if the Minister reassured me that it is not because the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee happens to be a Hampshire MP and that there are a number of highly marginal Labour seats in north Kent that those counties have been allowed to have their way, while Essex has not.
	Amendment No. 2 is particularly attractive, because the Government, despite the promises and rhetoric of the Prime Minister, are not prepared to listen. When the previous Home Secretary told the House that he would listen to the views of people in the next phase of the process, I asked whether he would listen if the overwhelming majority of people in Essex voted in a referendum in favour of keeping a stand-alone force, and he at least had the decency to say that he would not. That shows that the Government have paid lip service to listening to local people and consultations, which are a waste of time. They have no intention of listening.
	As was said earlier, the last Home Secretary put before the House a set of proposals that he was determined to maintain, come hell or high water, and for appearance's sake, he came out with all the usual platitudes about listening and consultation, but with no intention whatever of paying attention to what he was told or what he heard in the consultations. That is what is so frustrating, and it shows that we should have more referendums in this country, so that issues can be put to the people. If those most directly affected by proposals overwhelmingly support what the Government are doing—the evidence up and down the country seems to be that they do not—they can vote for the mergers in a referendum. If they are not supportive of what the Government are effectively ramming down their throats, they can vote no, and the Government would have to abide by the result, failing to continue with the mergers. That would follow as a result of the context set out in our amendments.
	That is the best way forward and I shall certainly support my hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs. I hope that anyone else who is disgusted, upset or disappointed by the Government's attempt to create these large police forces, which so few people want, will join us, so that we can force the Government to listen to the people, if they are not prepared to do so voluntarily.

Richard Shepherd: I, too, support amendment No. 82.
	I represent a constituency on the far east of the west midlands area, in the metropolitan borough of Walsall. The drift of modern politics is anything but local. We refer to local government, but Walsall is no more local than a fly in the air. We talk about local policing, but we are constructing great structures that are questionable as regards whether they will meet the tests of loyalty and a sense of time and place that my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Mr. Blunt) mentioned.
	If it would be a comfort to my hon. Friends and to my friends in Staffordshire, West Mercia or elsewhere in the greater west midlands, I would stand up for the principle of localism and the right to local policing. I note with regret that my own constituents in Aldridge-Brownhills—in Pelsall, Streetly, Rushall, and all the communities that form it, which are very much part of Staffordshire, historically and by linkage to the coalfields of south Staffordshire—have very little confidence, alas, in the policing that they are experiencing. We are divided between two command units based in Walsall and Bloxwich. They report, in theory, to central Birmingham, and a chief constable makes his dispensations. We are already some way down the line; goodness knows what would happen to Staffordshire or West Mercia if we were to go yet further down that line.
	The sense of localism is important. The mantra is, "Let the people feel confident with their institutions and structures." In all my political career, the attachment to those structures has shrunk. We should let the people speak. That used to be a cry of the Liberal party, and I would expect it to stand up for that localism and the rights of people as regards the things that most matter to them—education, a health service and policing. As I said, in the former villages now coalesced into Aldridge-Brownhills, there is little confidence in the way in which centralised policing takes place.
	The huge proposed west midlands area gives us even less confidence that Bloxwich and Walsall will manage with due diligence the affairs and protection of the people of Aldridge-Brownhills. In vast structures, people do not look laterally or downwards, but upwards. This Government can testify to that. My chief superintendents want to curry favour with the chief constable, who in turn wants the indulgence of the Home Office and the Home Secretary. We become so utterly centralised that it squeezes out the judgment as to who is competent and who is incompetent.
	This is a question of how the way in which we govern ourselves through our central administrations—through the Home Office and through Whitehall itself—echoes what the people of the country want. We speak from our local perspective; we vote with the party machine. That reinforces the strength of the centre. Where we over-centralise—that is what the whole Bill is essentially about—in the health service, education and the police service, we see the decline and fall of public confidence in those institutions. I hope that the House takes the amendment seriously and votes for it.

Bob Russell: I wanted to intervene on the hon. Member for West Chelmsford (Mr. Burns) to support the case that he was making, but he has not returned to his seat in the past 15 or 20 minutes or so. He expressed the view of all Essex Members of Parliament, the district councils, the borough councils and the unitary authorities. We now have an opportunity for the Government to get off the hook on which they have put themselves in being forced into a position whereby they must defend a line that everybody acknowledges is unpopular.
	I invite the Minister to explain why Essex, with a population that is larger than several sovereign nation states in the European Union, is deemed incapable of having its own police force, whereas Kent, on the other side of the River Thames, is apparently competent to do so. The people of Essex are perfectly entitled to ask why that is okay for Kent but not for Essex. If there were to be mergers in the six counties of the east of England, the logical amalgamation would have been of Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk. We are getting the worst of all worlds.

Lynne Featherstone: The hon. Gentleman makes a good point, but that is a completely different discussion.
	It is clear that it might sometimes be necessary to release someone on bail while the decision is being taken on whether they breached the conditional caution. In fact, that might be a more proportionate measure than detention in custody. It is also clear that if investigations into the suspected breach have not been concluded within 12 hours—the time limit for detention—it might be necessary to release the person on bail, to ensure their attendance at a police station for further questioning at a later date. The last amendment in the group would retain the power to release on bail in such circumstances.
	We are concerned about the training provided for constables who administer summary justice. If the police are to be able to impose punishments, they need a particular level of training. Amendments Nos. 28 and 29 would require constables to have appropriate training before they imposed bail conditions, to ensure that the suspect did not commit an offence on bail, interfere with witnesses or obstruct the course of justice. All constables would be able to impose such conditions as they considered necessary to ensure that the suspect surrendered to custody.
	The granting of bail in a police station is the responsibility of the custody sergeant, who is a figure independent of the investigation; it is not the arresting officer—the policeman on the beat—who imposes bail. A custody sergeant has specialist training and expertise in order to perform a semi-judicial role in deciding whether bail conditions are justified. We want such training to be transferred across to those who will administer conditions. Clearly, the custody officer will not be present when street bail is given. Instead, the officer responsible for deciding on the conditions to be imposed will be the investigating officer, who is not impartial and would not have the training and experience of a custody officer.
	The proposal that would require constables to make decisions about conditions needed to ensure that a suspect did not offend when on bail is not viable either. A decision involving street bail places on the arresting constable the responsibility of achieving a balance between the aims of the conditions of bail and the rights of the suspect. The constable would also have to make judgments about the suspect's likely future behaviour. That is a very grey area. We believe that constables should have the requisite training and expertise before they can impose conditions on street bail for purposes broader than ensuring attendance at a police station.
	In Committee, the previous Minister accepted those arguments and said:
	"Of course, we will expect officers exercising such powers to be properly trained. We expect that with any powers that the police are given. They have extensive training, and we will expect them to be properly trained in those powers."—[ Official Report, Standing Committee D, 21 March 2006; c. 134-5.]
	In light of that statement, we can see no reason why the Government should reject the proposal to include the requirements in the amendments in the Bill. We could then write the expectations of the previous Minister in Committee, and our proposals today, into the legislation.

Nick Herbert: I wish to lend my party's support to some of the concerns that underlie the amendments, if not the amendments specifically. We believe that limits on conditional cautions should be taken seriously. The Government favour what appears to be a considerable extension of summary power, and just before the local elections they slipped into the press—it was obviously intended to be a much bigger story, but was drowned by the events that engulfed the Government at the time—a further extension of the ability of police officers to issue on-the-spot fines for a range of offences. We look forward to hearing more about those proposals when they are properly announced to the House, and not by way of newspaper articles just before local elections.
	The common denominator in the extension of summary power is that the courts are being taken out of the equation. Fixed penalties and conditional cautions are both alternatives to prosecution and have generally related to minor matters. My party supported the introduction of conditional cautions when they were introduced, but if punishment is involved it should, in principle, be a matter for some form of court involvement. The punishment becomes a form of sentence and the Magistrates Association has expressed great concern about the fact that it is being entirely removed from oversight of the operation of conditional cautions, which will be a matter for prosecutors.
	When Lord Justice Auld, in his 2001 review of criminal courts, supported the introduction of a more general, formalised and conditional cautioning system, he also said:
	"Any such scheme should, save for the most minor offences, be the responsibility of the CPS and subject to the approval of the court. Without the protection of the court's approval, its use could be used or perceived as a 'cop-out' by the prosecution to avoid prosecuting cases that should be prosecuted, or of innocent criminals being at risk of pressure to accept onerous compromises to avoid prosecution, or of the rich being able to buy their way out of prosecution when the poor could not."
	The Magistrates Association points out that judges and magistrates take an oath, receive training, operate in public and have to announce the reasons for a sentence in open court—including any departure from sentencing guidelines—but the same does not apply to prosecutors. Where will the public accountability be for the operation of the conditional cautions?
	This direction of policy is described as the extension of summary power, but magistrates courts are summary courts. That is where summary justice should be administered. The proper response to the Prime Minister's concern that the operation of justice has not been fast enough, which we share, would be to look at the operation of the court system and the Crown Prosecution Service. The recent NAO report pointed out that between that between 150,000 and 180,000 ineffective hearings every year were caused by the prosecution, the police and the CPS.
	We will not oppose the extension proposals in the Bill, although we have reservations about the sort of offences that will be involved. As the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Lynne Featherstone) said, some of them will be quite serious, and we will watch this policy development with some concern. We need reassurance about the proposals flagged up in the media for a further extension of summary justice. We need to know the extent to which magistrates courts are being closed out of the sentencing process simply for the sake of more rapid justice.

James Brokenshire: This issue was discussed in some detail in Committee, so I shall be brief. However, I shall begin by welcoming the three new Ministers to their Front-Bench responsibilities. The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Enfield, North (Joan Ryan), used to be a Whip, so I am pleased that her promotion allows her to speak on Home Office matters.
	The direction of policy in respect of summary justice has brought conditional cautions into closer focus. The obvious change that the Bill introduces is that the conditions attached to cautions are intended to punish the offender. That is the aspect of the Bill that has caused most disquiet when it comes to the intended operation of the cautions, and the comments of John Thornhill, the chairman of the Magistrates Association's judicial policy and practice committee, are interesting in that regard. He said:
	"We consider it contrary to the principles of justice for prosecutors and police to be able to impose punishment without the involvement of the judiciary. A democratic legal system ensures that an independent tribunal—the judiciary—should sentence and impose punishment, thus preventing bias from prosecutorial authorities."
	Is it right for the police or prosecutorial authorities to extend their jurisdiction much further? If so, how far do we go? That is the substance of the debate on these amendments. However, if conditions that in essence are sentences or punishments are to be imposed, is a person from the police or the CPS the right person to impose them? Two possibilities arise. First, a person might accept a caution with conditions less stringent than would be the case if the matter were referred to the magistrates court or some other judicial body. Secondly, and alternatively, a person might be advised or required to accept a caution without realising that the conditions are more draconian than those that a court would impose.
	Other amendments in the group apply to police bail, to which a similar quasi-judicial approach should be adopted. The Magistrates Association believes that bail conditions must be examined very carefully, and that as much information as possible is obtained when the conditions are set. Sufficient training must be given to officers, and the proper safeguards put in place, to ensure that the conditions that are attached are appropriate. In that way, the people on the street who use street bail can do so in a way that is both effective and fitting.

Liam Byrne: With your permission, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I shall make one or two concluding remarks.
	Many years ago I read my Maitland—"The Constitutional History of England"—and I can still remember that flexibility has characterised the English system of law for the past 1,000 years. I am not a lawyer, however, so I hope that my historical reading is right, because that debate is at the heart of the issue we have been discussing.
	The hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Lynne Featherstone) expressed concern about two-tier justice. Too many of our communities already experience two-tier justice when offenders go unpunished and cause havoc in their communities. That is exactly why the extension that we propose in conditional cautioning and street bail is so important. It is also important to note that it is for the Crown Prosecution Service and the police to decide whether to issue a caution or press the matter to court. We often hear from both sides of the House that we should put great trust in the judgment of front-line professionals and that is a useful reminder in this case.
	I can advise the hon. Lady that the conditions attached to cautions must, according to the code on conditional cautioning, be appropriate and proportionate. Secondly, it is certainly not the case that unlimited detention is envisaged for breach of the conditions. Under the relevant guidance, custody officers must release individuals, or release them on bail, as soon as practicable. There is additional back-up in the protection offered by PACE—the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. On the hon. Lady's final point about appropriate training, it is a prerequisite that a constable is fit to execute his or her responsibilities.
	The hon. Member for Hornchurch (James Brokenshire) expressed concern about the attaching of punitive conditions. That is an important issue. One of the great virtues of being a by-election winner is that I can share experience of my community with the many Members on both sides of the House who visited it in 2004. For many people in the area that I was elected to serve, the possibility offered by indirect reparation is extremely significant as we go about rebuilding a community of which we are proud.
	I commend the Government proposals to the House and urge Opposition Members to withdraw their amendments.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	 Clause read a Second time, and added to the Bill.

New Clause 1
	 — 
	Protection of Children: Prohibition of Police and Conditional Cautions

Mr. Deputy Speaker: With this it will be convenient to discuss the following: New clause 2— Encrypted data and indecent photographs of a child—
	'(1) The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (c. 23) is amended as follows.
	(2) In section 53 (failure to comply with a notice)—
	(a) after subsection (5A)(a) there is inserted—
	"(aa) in a case to which subsection (6) applies, seven years;"
	(b) after subsection (5B) there is inserted—
	"(6) This subsection applies where—
	(a) a person has been previously convicted of an offence contrary to section 1 of the Protection of Children Act 1978 (c. 37) or section 160 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 (c. 33); or
	(b) the apparatus or data storage device containing the protected information contains an indecent photograph or pseudo-photograph of a child; or
	(c) the apparatus or data storage device containing the protected information has come into the possession of any person together with other apparatus or a data storage device which contains an indecent photograph or pseudo-photograph of a child; or
	(d) the court is satisfied that the protected information is likely to contain an indecent photograph or pseudo-photograph of a child.
	(7) Subsection (b) will not apply where the person to whom the notice is given can show that the protected information does not contain an indecent photograph or pseudo-photograph of a child.
	(8) In this section 'indecent photograph or pseudo-photograph of a child' shall have the same meaning as that set out in the Protection of Children Act 1978 (c. 37)".
	(3) After paragraph 36 of Schedule 3 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 (c. 42) there is inserted—
	"36A An offence under section 53 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (c. 23) if subsection (6) of that section applies."'.
	New clause 3— Extension of offences requiring notification—
	'After paragraph 29 of Schedule 3 to the Sexual Offences Act 2003 (c. 42) there shall be inserted—
	"29A An offence under sections 48 to 50 of this Act (abuse of children through prostitution and pornography) where the offender—
	(a) was 18 or over, or
	(b) is or has been sentenced in respect of the offences for a term of at least 12 months".'.
	New clause 9— Police powers of entry and examination of relevant offender's home address—
	After section 88 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 (c. 42) there is inserted—
	"88A Police powers of entry and examination of relevant offender's home address for confirmation of residency and risk assessment
	(1) Upon application by a constable of a relevant force a justice of the peace may grant a warrant authorising him to enter premises named on the warrant if he is satisfied that the conditions in subsection (2) are satisfied and that it is necessary for a warrant to be issued.
	(2) The conditions mentioned in subsection (1) are—
	(a) that it is necessary to enter the premises named on the warrant to confirm the residency and risk assessment of the relevant person;
	(b) that it would assist the carrying out of the purpose of confirmation of residency and risk assessment, for a constable of the relevant force to examine and search the premises and the things in them; and
	(c) that on more than one occasion a constable of the relevant force has attempted to examine and search the premises and the things in them for the purpose of ascertaining residency and risk assessing the offender and has been unable (whether by not being able to search and examine the premises and the things in them, or by not being able to obtain entry to the premises) to do so.
	(3) Section 16 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (c. 60) applies to warrants issued under subsections (1) above as though it were a search warrant issued under that Act.
	(4) The power to issue a warrant conferred by this section is in addition to any such power otherwise conferred.
	(5) This section does not prejudice any other power of entry, examination, search or seizure.
	(6) In this section—
	'premises' means an address whose address has been notified by a relevant offender under sections 83 to 85 of this Act.'the relevant force' means the police force maintained for the area in which the premises are situated." '.
	New clause 10— Duty on sexual or violent offender to co-operate—
	After section 67 of the Criminal Justice and Court Services Act 2000 (c. 43) insert—
	"67A Duty on offender to co-operate
	(1) A relevant sexual or violent offender shall co-operate with any reasonable steps requested of him by the responsible authority.
	(2) 'Reasonable steps' shall:
	(a) include, but not be restricted to, providing access to his home address during a reasonable time of day to facilitate a risk assessment by the responsible authority; and
	(b) be restricted to steps necessary for them to discharge their responsibility under section 67 of this Act to assess the risk posed by the offender.
	(3) A person who without reasonable excuse fails to comply with a reasonable step requested by him under subsection (1) of this section shall be liable upon summary conviction to imprisonment for a term not exceeding six months or a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum or both.
	(4) In this section—
	'relevant sexual or violent offender' has the meaning given by section 68;'responsible authority' shall have the meaning given by section 67;'home address' shall have the meaning given by section 83(7) of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 (c. 42)." '.
	No. 42, in title, line 8, after 'children', insert
	'and offences relating to child pornography.'.

Bob Spink: According to answers to my parliamentary questions, the police cautioned 807 such people in the past two years alone, mostly for taking indecent photographs of children. Given the nature of paedophiles and their tendency to reoffend, it is a fair assumption that some and probably many of those 807 people went on to commit further offences, which may or may not have been detected. Those offences clearly damage our innocent young children. The use of cautions in those circumstances, rather than the public trial that such people deserve, helps them to reoffend and therefore damages our children.
	All hon. Members know that those offences destroy children and families. I put it to the House that, if only one of those 807 people went on to reoffend—the House must remember that they have admitted their offence and that they are guilty of an offence against innocent children—the use of the caution was wrong in all cases and should not have been used. Cautions should be used generally only where, first, the offence, which must be admitted in full by the criminal, has only minor consequences for either individual victims or society at large and, secondly, where offenders are unlikely to reoffend, where the caution will do the job of pulling them up, showing them that what they did was wrong and preventing them from going on to reoffend. Clearly, neither of those two tests is usually met in the case of paedophile activity.
	Instead of leaving the decision about whether or not to caution to a police officer, who may or may not be an expert in dealing with serious child abuse, Parliament—which should protect our children, not the abusers—should prevent the use of cautions for paedophile activity in all but truly exceptional cases. New clause 1(2) sets out the exceptional case, where the officer believes that the offender is unlikely to commit further offences, but that exception would not normally apply. Once paedophiles are apprehended, they should be put through the courts—the right place for such serious offences, thus ensuring that the public are aware of their proclivities and giving parents in the locality a better chance of defending their innocent children by keeping an eye on the offenders.
	When the subject was debated before in the House, the argument was advanced that it is sometimes easier to secure a confession and therefore to impose a caution than to secure a conviction. It was argued that it is therefore sometimes possible to pin down someone as an offender by offering a caution, when they might escape conviction if the matter was taken before the courts. That is a serious argument against taking people who abuse children before the courts, and I should like to address it very briefly now.
	The offence and its consequences are so serious that I believe that, on balance, a trial in court is the right way forward in almost all cases. The use of summary powers that the Bill generally seeks to extend is not appropriate for such particularly obnoxious offences. I strongly suspect anyway that an offence is only admitted and a caution only accepted by paedophiles when they know that the evidence against them is so compelling that they would be found guilty, since the cautioned criminal will be entered in any event on to the sex offenders register and no reasonable person would accept that lightly without the very high probability or almost certainty of being found guilty at trial.
	I am sure the House will be surprised that the use of cautions for such offences has increased almost tenfold over the past few years. I want that trend to be reversed. I want paedophiles to get the justice that they deserve and our children to get the protection that they deserve. I hope that hon. Members will support my new clause, which would let the police, the courts and the public know that the House takes the matter very seriously and is intent on giving maximum protection to our innocent children.

Paul Beresford: I shall speak to new clauses 2, 3, 9 and 10 and amendment No. 42, on behalf of my hon. Friends and myself. I welcome the Minister to his new post. We are not discussing teeth, and I am sure that he and I are both pleased about that, but the subject that we are discussing is very grim, and it is a bit hard for him to be covering it on his first day at the Dispatch Box.
	The new clauses strengthen the law against sex offenders, especially against those who offend against children. As the Minister will know from his background research, I have spent some time with the Metropolitan police paedophile unit and the issue has developed into something of a minor campaign for me. There has been enormous co-operation between various Home Office Ministers, civil servants, Conservative Front Benchers and me. Perhaps the best example is the Committee stage of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which saw some very close discussion and changes. It was an unusual Committee stage because of the co-operation. In effect, the new clauses derive from those discussions.
	At that stage, the then Minister, the hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale, East (Paul Goggins), asked that the ideas that I am putting forward today be stored for further consideration. Over recent weeks, my small team of Alisdair Gillespie, who is an academic barrister and a specialist in this area, Detective Chief Inspector Matt Sarti and I—we are all on the unit that is working on this area in the Home Office, although I must admit that their attendance is considerably better than mine—had a number of meetings with the Minister's predecessor to discuss the way forward on the new clauses.
	Amendment No. 42 simply broadens the long title to enable the new clauses to be covered. The meat of the clauses starts with new clause 2 on encryption. It is well known that paedophiles collect child abuse pornographic photographic images, some of which are real and some of which are pseudo. There has been a huge increase in such activity with the arrival of the internet, and the activity is expanding massively at the moment. Paedophiles use the images to stimulate themselves and others. The images are sold between individuals, frequently not for financial gain, but for new abuse images. One must remember that every single abuse photograph represents at least one child being abused on one occasion. The thought of new images being constantly produced to fulfil that demand is quite horrific.
	Many of the images are in the form of videos or DVDs or are on computers. Increasingly, they are kept on remote storage. Some of the computers that the police collect have no hard drives at all. They are driven or initiated by a disk and the information is stored remotely. Increasingly, the information is hidden by encryption. We used to have simple encryption, but we have moved to 128 bit and, even more, to 256 bit encryption. The software is freely available on the internet and relatively easy to use. Essentially, it is unbreakable.
	The other thing that particularly alarms me is that Vista, which is the replacement for Windows OS, is due out generally next year. Once that system is on board the security is such that, when the computer is turned off, it automatically encrypts all the information on it so that when the police collect the computer and turn it on, they cannot break through the encryption. Some information can be destroyed, preventing access by the police. The police clearly need access for obvious reasons. They need to seek evidence against individuals and, frequently—because offenders sometimes work in packs or groups—against others. In a way, perhaps it is even more important that the police can identify the children in the photographs and movies. Once those children have been located, it is possible to seek care and counselling for them to try to bring them back into a normal life. There is some evidence that abused children go on to become abusers themselves.
	The new clause deals with encrypted data found on computers and storage in cases where the police believe that the encrypted data contains abusive images of children. It does not create any new offence or scheme, but rather amends the sentencing regime under section 53 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, which is commonly known as RIPA. Part III requires a person to comply with a notice issued by the police to hand over the encryption key for protected data. The penalty for a breach is two years, but that is ludicrous for a paedophile because the alternative penalty, if the information was turned over, would often be five years or more and, frequently, having to go on the sex offenders list. Accordingly, it is unlikely that an offender who has indecent and abusive photographs of children on his computer would comply with the notice. To achieve compliance, we need to step up the penalty, so I suggest that such offenders should be liable for up to 10 years' imprisonment, which is the penalty for contravening section 1 of the Protection of Children Act 1978—there is thinking and a link behind the idea.
	The new clause would simply raise the sentence if a court was satisfied that it was more than likely that the majority of the encrypted data consisted of indecent photographs of children. I suggest that the civil burden is permissible because the offence would be not possessing the photographs of children, which would be punished separately, but the failure to hand over the key. The higher sentence would apply only when one of two thresholds was passed: first, that the computer had non-encrypted indecent photos of children or a child on it, as an indication; or, secondly, that the person had been previously convicted of an offence contrary to section 1 of the Protection of Children Act 1978 or section 160 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988.
	I will move on to new clause 3. Sections 48 to 50 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which make provision for the offences of recruiting or controlling a child involved in pornography or prostitution, are not, for some reason, prescribed for the purposes of notification requirements under part 2 of the Act. I am afraid that my Front-Bench colleagues and I missed that at the time at which the legislation was passed. Those sections are not being used by the police and prosecutors because they do not have the notification that applies to most of, if not all, the other provisions relating to the abuse of children. I hope that the Minister will agree that there is no valid reason why people convicted of such an offence should not be required to notify the police of their details, because they are directly involved in the abuse and exploitation of children and need monitoring and risk assessment.
	New clauses 9 and 10 are two different approaches to the same problem: the risk assessment of offenders on the sex offenders list. It is coincidental that we are debating the matter today because it relates to two recent high-profile cases: today there was a report on the rapist and murderer of Naomi Bryant, and, three or so weeks ago, a paedophile was reported as having persistently raped a nine-year-old girl over a period of three years. Both people were on the sex offenders list, and it is possible that a change along the lines that I am suggesting could have helped in those cases.
	The police in this country are required to risk-assess offenders. The House will be aware that paedophiles are especially prone to reoffend. If I may quote a well-known barrister steeped in the practice of defending paedophiles—I cannot think of a more obnoxious task—they are the "most devious, lying individuals" she has ever had to deal with.
	Most western countries have sex offenders lists and virtually all require risk assessment. Most give the police the opportunity to do that, but, unfortunately, those undertaking such risk assessments in this country have limited rights of access. Here, to date, most offenders co-operate, but I am fairly sure that that is mainly because they are ignorant of the fact that they can shut the door in the face of the police or their agents who come to check a residency for the purposes of a risk assessment.
	Unfortunately, it is increasingly becoming apparent that more and more such individuals are realising that there is a flaw in legislation. Many give false or temporary addresses. They move to caravans or move around in caravans. I know of a group of them who live in canal boats in London. Some live with relatives, or give relatives' addresses. It is quite hideously worrying for the police that one individual, whom I will not name, owns a block of flats, and, as far as he is concerned, the front door of the block of flats is his front door. The police thus cannot get into the block, although they are aware that single-parent mothers and their children live in flats in that block—one's imagination can run with that.
	We discussed all these matters with the Minister's predecessor. I felt that there was general agreement between my team and the Minister that change was needed, but it was the approach that we were discussing. New clause 9 follows the approach that I believe the Minister and his advisers wish to follow. I understand that it is the approach that has been taken in Scotland. Ministers prefer that both countries should have comparable legislation, unless we can arrive at better legislation. In spite of my Scottish ancestry, it might be appropriate that we have better legislation here in England and that the Scots copy us rather than the other way round.
	New clause 9 enables the police to obtain a warrant to ensure confirmation and risk assessment. I personally feel that new clause 10 is a better approach. It is a lateral-thinking approach in that it requires the offender to co-operate, both within a reasonable excess request and to co-operate with any reasonable risk assessment requests. The clause goes further than new clause 9 but is gentler. New clause 9 requires admission and new clause 10 co-operation. I think that we will find that most of our beleagured police forces would prefer new clause 10 because it goes that step further.
	I suspect that some people may believe that the human rights of the offenders that we are discussing are being breached. I point to the word "reasonable", which appears in both of the new clauses. Secondly, it would be rather nice if we considered the human rights of the children who could be abused. Child sex offenders frequently go on to abuse. They abuse the human rights of individuals. Some offenders may rape, something which I have mentioned already. There is sometimes murder, as has been reported in today's media.
	I hope that the Minister will see that there is an opportunity to act now. It is an opportunity to move: before even Microsoft is ready for us, we are ready for it. Delay would leave a breathing space for some horrible offenders who have a record of often horrendous abuse towards innocent members of our society, especially children. There is a figure that the police gave me some years ago; they conservatively estimate that there are 230,000 active paedophiles, many of whom are women, in this country. That is a sufficient number for one in every street.

David Davies: I support the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Castle Point (Bob Spink). I understand that conditional cautions were being handed out as a means of discouraging people who might have committed one offence from committing further offences. It was a form of warning. As my hon. Friend said, it was a way of pulling people up short. It is clear that the system is being flagrantly abused. It seems to have been transmogrified into a means of keeping people out of the courts and ultimately out of prison, which I believe is a means of saving money. I find that unacceptable.
	Labour Members will know that only one crime in 20 is solved. I believe that that includes the 30,000 or so people who are issued with cautions every year. That means that anyone who commits a crime can be assumed to have committed at least 20 offences before being caught. We have been discussing paedophiles disseminating child pornography, and it is reasonable to assume that they will have committed many more than 20 offences when they are finally caught.
	It is ludicrous that we caution people who have committed such serious offences. We issue cautions for offences such as burglary or grievous bodily harm. I would much rather scrap the system of cautions when people have committed serious crime and bring them to court, punish them and give their victims justice. If we must continue with the ludicrous system of cautions, which is abused, the very least that we can do is try to ensure that those who have committed the most serious offences are not able to escape justice by accepting caution. There are not many offences that are more serious than disseminating child pornography and abusing children from some perverted and twisted personal enjoyment. It is only appropriate that we remove the right of criminals to be able to accept a caution for something as serious as the offences that they have committed.

Liam Byrne: I share that concern and I was keen to understand the issue when it was raised in my briefing from officials at the Home Office. The assurance that I have been given is that the new codes, particularly the one for the Crown prosecutors, will confront those issues head on.
	I would like to deal now with new clause 2, the ambitions of which are welcome. As the hon. Member for Mole Valley explained, the new clause is designed to increase the maximum penalty for an offence under section 53 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, which is failing to comply with a requirement to disclose protected information or the key to it. The increase in the maximum penalty would apply in the circumstances set out in new subsection (6) of section 53 of RlPA, including where the offender has a previous conviction for possession of indecent images of a child.
	The use of encryption is, as the hon. Member for Mole Valley pointed out, proliferating. Encryption products are more widely available and are integrated as security features in standard operating systems, so the Government have concluded that it is now right to implement the provisions of part 3 of RIPA, including section 53, which is not presently in force.
	The threat to public safety posed by terrorist use of encryption technology was recognised in section 15 of the Terrorism Act 2006, which increased the maximum penalty for the section 53 offence to five years in a national security case. The Government will therefore publish for consultation a draft statutory code of practice for the investigation of protected electronic data and the exercise of powers in part 3 of RIPA.
	We have previously given an undertaking to bring forward proposals in line with new clause 2 in the context of consulting on the implementation of part 3, and we shall shortly begin those consultations. We remain very sympathetic to what the new clause is designed to do, but we want to allow an opportunity for public consideration and comment on the proposals first, before implementing any legislative changes.
	On new clause 3, schedule 3 to the Sexual Offences Act 2003 lists the offences for which a conviction, finding or caution will, subject to certain sentencing thresholds being met, result in the offender being made subject to the notification requirements of part 2 of the 2003 Act—more commonly known as the sex offenders register. When schedule 3 was drawn up, we decided not to include the offences under sections 48 to 50 of the 2003 Act because we were of the view that such offences could be motivated by factors such as greed. We did, however, include the offences in schedule 5 to the 2003 Act. Inclusion in schedule 5 means that if there is a demonstrable risk of serious sexual harm from the offenders, courts can make a sexual offences prevention order either when dealing with such an offender or on subsequent application from the police. That order has the effect of placing the offender on to the sex offenders register as well as making him subject to the prohibitions imposed by the order itself.
	I am, however, extremely sympathetic to the view of the hon. Member for Mole Valley that, while offences in sections 48 to 50 are not strictly sexual offences, those who perpetrate them demonstrate, at the very least, a callous disregard of the sexual well-being of children, pose a threat, and may require the monitoring that registration brings. My officials will therefore review the content of schedules 3 and 5 over the summer. I can assure the hon. Gentleman that his proposals will be central to that review. Changes to schedules 3 and 5 do not require primary legislation and can be made by order subject to affirmative resolution. Instead of making piecemeal changes today, we should await the results of the review and look to make all necessary changes through an order to be laid in the autumn. This morning, after we spoke, I explored precisely what order-making powers are available under section 130 of the 2003 Act.
	New clause 9 introduces a new power for the police to enter and search the home address of offenders who are subject to the notification requirements of part 2 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003. On that point, I associate myself with the sentiments expressed by the hon. Member for Beaconsfield. I also pay tribute to the hon. Member for Mole Valley for the work that he has undertaken. In 2005, he dedicated his private Member's Bill to this issue, and I very much appreciate the thought that he has given to it. In March, my hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale, East said that although we had previously rejected measures similar to those contained in the new clause, we must keep our position open and under review.
	In recent months, several developments have caused the Government to review that position. Professor Irving's report for the Scottish Executive looked carefully at the way in which offenders are managed in the community to minimise the risk that they pose. Professor Irving concluded that a power of entry for the police was necessary. Officials at the Home Office conducted a review of the effectiveness of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, taking into account the views of law enforcement professionals, prosecutors and the courts, and reached a similar conclusion. As the hon. Member for Mole Valley is aware, officials have been working on drafting an appropriate clause, and we are seeking an appropriate legislative vehicle to make the change. I assure him that we are giving these issues very serious consideration, and we hope to be in a position to put something before Parliament in the near future. Government conventions prevent me from going any further at this stage, but I know that he will be aware of programmes in another place.
	Finally, I want to say a few words about new clause 10. Hon. Members will be aware that the Criminal Justice Act 2003 provides the statutory framework for inter-agency co-operation in assessing and managing violent offenders and sex offenders under arrangements known as multi-agency public protection arrangements. I should like to offer the House officials' first view of the new clauses drafted by the hon. Member for Mole Valley, which may need further reflection. Under the arrangements, the police and probation services and the Prison Service, supported by additional agencies, work together to manage the risk posed by dangerous offenders to the public. The "critical few" offenders who pose the highest risk are referred to a multi-agency public protection panel—MAPPP—where their cases are regularly scrutinised by senior representatives of local agencies.
	As I understand it, new clause 10 tries to introduce a requirement on all such offenders to "co-operate" with any "reasonable steps" imposed on them by any responsible authority. That would include the probation and police services and the Prison Service. Failure to do that would be a criminal offence. However, we believe that the new clause may need further reflection because, in a great many cases, MAPPA offenders will be subject to the sex offenders register, a community penalty and/or release from imprisonment on licence. That means that there will already be clear requirements on the offenders, with repercussions if they fail to comply. We would therefore like the opportunity to give the matter further consideration.
	In the light of those comments, I hope that my assurances will provide sufficient comfort for hon. Members to agree to withdraw the motion but to work with us on implementing their ambitions.

Dominic Grieve: It is clear from early-day motions, which numerous Members of Parliament of all parties signed—the last one I saw contained 154 signatures—that the amendments cover a matter of serious concern. The new clause deals with the Extradition Act 2003, especially its operation in relation to the United States of America, but also more generally, and whether it is a fair and reasonable way to proceed.
	If new clause 8 were accepted, it would omit the United States of America from the list of designated territories in category 2 of the 2003 Act. The United States could not therefore continue to enjoy its current privileged status in securing extradition without producing evidence. That is linked to amendment No. 118, which would prevent any redesignation until the ratification of the United Kingdom-United States extradition treaty, which was concluded in 2003, on both sides of the Atlantic. Ratification has taken place here but, as yet, there has been no reciprocity from the United States.
	Amendments Nos. 116 and 117 try to cover a separate but related issue. If they were accepted, they would introduce into European extradition proceedings, under the European extradition warrant, and into extradition to a category 2 territory, the possibility of the court's examining whether the conduct disclosed by a request or constituting the offence was committed partly in the United Kingdom. No order for extradition would be made unless it appeared, in the light of all the circumstances, that it was in the interests of justice for the person to be tried in the territory that sought extradition. Moreover, under subsection (2), in deciding whether the interests of justice required extradition, the judge would be entitled to look at whether the competent United Kingdom authorities had decided to refrain from prosecuting the person whose surrender was sought, and for whom the extradition was requested.
	I shall try to be brief, but it is important to understand the background to these matters. Before 1 January 2004 and the implementation of the Extradition Act 2003, extradition to many countries outside Europe—the United States in particular—was governed by a treaty entered into in 1972. There was reciprocity under that treaty. If we wished to extradite someone from the United States, it was necessary to show probable cause of an offence having been committed. If the United States wished to extradite someone from the United Kingdom, a prima facie case had to be established. Some play has been made of the fact that it might be easier to show probable cause than to establish a prima facie case. However, both requirements responded to national legal principles and, in reality, very little turns on the distinction.
	There were problems with the 1972 treaty. It was suggested that it took a long time to get extradition from this country, although I believe that that says more about the problems with our court procedure than anything else. In addition, there were further blocks on extradition that presented a real problem. They included the fact that certain offences were not covered at all. For example, a person could not be extradited from the United States for child pornography, which we have just discussed. Indeed, that still applies. The statute of limitations was also frequently invoked in the United States, placing a bar on some offences for which we sought extradition. Speciality claims were made, and some offences became incapable of extradition. There were also problems when someone was in prison in the United States for a minor offence but was wanted in this country for a major one.
	I welcome the fact that a new treaty was negotiated between this country and the United States of America. It went a long way towards solving those problems. However, although we have signed and ratified the treaty, and allowed the United States to operate a procedure for extradition that is akin to that of our European neighbours and requires no evidence whatever to be produced, no reciprocity has been provided by the United States at all.
	The treaty was signed on 31 March 2003. On 16 December, Baroness Scotland gave assurances in another place that ratification was due to take place in the United States in early 2004. On 16 June 2005, she expressed
	"genuine disappointment that the United States' authorities have not found the time or energy to ratify the provision."—[ Official Report, House of Lords, 16 June 2005; Vol. 672, c. 1198.]
	Twelve months later, we are still waiting. There is considerable evidence in the United States that there are many bodies—including civil rights groups and the senators linked to them—that intend to prevent ratification from taking place if possible.
	It is not surprising that this state of affairs has come about. Why should the United States Government be bothered? As Baroness Scotland candidly explained, in a debate in the other place last year,
	"the Extradition Act 2003 effectively implemented the provisions of the new UK/US extradition treaty."—[ Official Report, House of Lords, 30 June 2005; Vol. 673, c. 408.]
	She failed to add that this had happened on an entirely one-sided basis. The statutory instrument that was passed designated the United States under category 2. Extradition has become easy, and virtually all scrutiny has been removed. Bizarrely, this is completely contrary to article 9 of the treaty, which is still legally in force.
	When the Government proceeded to include the United States as a category 2 designation under the Extradition Act, they told us that this was essential for the prevention of terrorism and for bringing suspected terrorists to justice. That is plainly an important consideration, of which the House must be mindful. That being said, in the case of Mr. Lotfi Raissi, the Algerian national and airline pilot whose extradition from this country was sought after 9/11 on the grounds that he had failed to disclose information to the US authorities that might have prevented that attack, the United States Government had to operate under the old system of showing a prima facie case. As was graphically described to the Home Affairs Committee by the district judge who handled that matter, it became apparent in the course of proceedings that there was no case against him whatever, and there was a complete mistake as to his identity, who he was and what his involvement had been. Under the Extradition Act provisions as they currently stand, Mr. Raissi would have been extradited to the United States without more ado.
	Perhaps more relevantly, when anxiety was being expressed about the operation of the Extradition Act, the Government gave assurances that it would not extend to financial crime. Those were the very words of the hon. Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint), then a Home Office Minister. She was responding to a  Financial Times article expressing specific concern that offences such as price fixing, which were not offences in the United Kingdom but might have been offences in the United States in the past in parallel, could become extraditable. She said:
	"We do not have such a range of offences involving financial crime. The cases mentioned by the  Financial Times— such as price fixing—would not apply. Dual criminality would have to exist." —[ Official Report, Third Standing Committee on Delegated Legislation, 15 December 2003; c. 26.]
	It has become apparent that what she told the House on that occasion was completely erroneous.
	United States district attorneys, discovering—to their considerable pleasure, I am sure—that extradition has become a mere mechanistic procedure in this country, have found ways of side-stepping problems with the lack of dual criminality. My constituent, Mr. Ian Norris, managing director of Morgan Crucible, is currently facing extradition for price fixing at a time when it was completely legal in the United Kingdom and all the decisions were taken here. The allegations have been changed to conspiracy to defraud, on the basis that that was the outcome as it affected the United States, thus getting round the dual criminality provisions. The Minister will be able to provide us with more information, but I understand that such examples are becoming numerous.
	In addition, the United States has also asserted jurisdiction in cases in which every bit of common sense dictates that the connection with the United States is extremely tenuous. The mere passage of an e-mail through a United States server is sufficient for the purposes of jurisdiction. In theoretical terms, that must give the USA almost universal worldwide jurisdiction over every crime. In the Enron case, extradition is being applied for in relation to defendants whose alleged crime is to have defrauded—a serious offence—a British bank of many millions of pounds in this country, when the bank has never alleged fraud and no proceedings have ever been brought here.

David Heath: I accept what the hon. Gentleman says, and that he and his colleagues acted in good faith; I simply say that they were mistaken.
	I want to deal first with the lack of ratification on the part of the United States Congress. I find it quite astonishing that this treaty, which we have signed with those who are supposed to be our closest allies, is apparently of so little import in the US legislature. It is far from being a priority for Congress, which has found opportunities to ratify extradition treaties with Lithuania, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Peru, but, apparently, cannot find an opportunity to give proper consideration to reciprocal arrangements with the United Kingdom. That says a lot for the supposedly special relationship that we enjoy with our friends in the United States.
	That would be cause for concern in itself, were it not for the extraordinarily asymmetric position of the treaty that the Government entered into. As I said in the Committee on the statutory instrument, even a Government acting under duress could not have signed a treaty that so badly sold short the interests of the citizens of this country, in comparison with those of another.  [Interruption.] The Minister of State, Department of Health, the hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham), says from a sedentary position that my observation is nonsense, but he or his hon. Friends will have to demonstrate why. This is clearly an entirely one-sided treaty. In fact, the then Minister —[Interruption.] If the hon. Gentleman wishes to intervene, he can explain to me, from the Dispatch Box, why my argument is nonsense. He has only just been reshuffled, yet he wants to interfere.
	In saying "Nonsense" from a sedentary position, the hon. Gentleman is asking the House to consider that the Minister then involved, the hon. Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint), who is now a Health Minister, was mistaken in saying that the treaty was asymmetric. She said:
	"In contrast, when we make extradition requests to the United States, we will need to submit sufficient evidence to establish 'probable cause'. That is a lower test than prima facie but a higher threshold than we ask of the United States, and I make no secret of that. Under the terms of its constitution the USA cannot set its evidential standard any lower than 'probable cause'."—[ Official Report, Third Standing Committee on Delegated Legislation, 15 December 2003; c. 7.]
	So on that day, the hon. Lady made no secret of the fact that there was an imbalance in the treaty, yet the hon. Gentleman says that that view is nonsense. The House will come to its own conclusions.  [Interruption.] The hon. Lady has arrived—she no doubt remembers the occasion when we last discussed this issue and what was said then.
	All manner of changes were implicit in the proposal that was before us. First, the treaty changed the basis on which extradition could take place. A certain level of evidence used to be required, and there was a list of extraditable offences. However, the treaty removed that list and we now have simply a sentence threshold of 12 months. Any offence that attracts a sentence of more than 12 months becomes an extraditable offence. The House will immediately draw from that the conclusion that it is now open to any of the legislatures in the US to make any offence that it deems to require a sentence of more than 12 months an extraditable offence. That is my second point.
	When we talk about the US, we are not talking about a relationship between our jurisdiction and their jurisdiction. We have two separate jurisdictions, but they have 51, including not only the federal jurisdiction, but the jurisdiction of 50 states, from Alabama to Wyoming, with vastly different concepts of jurisprudence and legal systems. To be frank, we also have vastly different levels of confidence in the ability of those various legislatures to carry out a trial in the way in which we would expect. Not only do we have an asymmetric view, but we have a treaty that applies to 51 different jurisdictions and we have no control over what they might determine to be an extraditable offence.
	The defence that the Minister gave at the time was that we also have reciprocal extradition arrangements with other countries, and she mentioned other European countries and what could be termed the "Anglo-Saxon" jurisdictions of Canada, New Zealand and Australia. But those systems are very much more similar to ours than are the American systems, so those comparisons are of no particular value. The US is a one-off in such terms.
	The next point is that the provisions were retrospective. Article 22.1 states:
	"This Treaty shall apply to offenses committed before as well as after the date it enters into force."
	Not only have we a prospective asymmetric arrangement with the US, but we will allow them to extradite British citizens for offences that took place before the treaty was even signed, let alone ratified—which looks unlikely to happen in the near future.
	On all those grounds, we have legitimate reasons for concern. However, the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) made another important point about the extraterritorial jurisdiction claimed by the US and by its states. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for North-East Fife (Sir Menzies Campbell), who attended the Committee, recalled the old joke that if one flies in a plane above the state of New York on one's way to California, the state of New York assumes a territorial jurisdiction on anything one may do. That is not far from the truth, and as the hon. Gentleman pointed out, it is a real concern when it comes to email traffic.
	We also have legitimate concerns when we see prospective extraditions for commercial crime against people operating in British companies that have connections with American companies, but whose activities are solely based in this country and who have never been to the great state of Delaware or Idaho, or wherever the American parent company may be based. Those people may be extraditable for matters that are not even offences in this country and were carried out in this country, not the US. They can be extradited and held in custody before trial in the US in a state in which they have never previously set foot. That is an extraordinary position to adopt.
	Another problem is that the level of evidence required does not go much beyond simple identification. The subject arouses much concern in this country, but the American investigatory bodies are not entirely foolproof in that regard. The House may recall a case that was current when we considered the Bill in Committee. It involved a Mr. Bond, arrested in South Africa at the request of FBI officials on the basis that he was really a Mr. Derek Sykes, who had defrauded many people out of millions of dollars. However, he really was Mr. Bond, a retired charity worker who worked in the Rotary club in Clifton in Bristol. He was nothing to do with the US, but he was imprisoned in South Africa on the basis of an identification by the FBI. Had he been in this country, he could have been extradited to stand trial for an offence and in a country of which he knew nothing, and on the basis that he was someone that he was not.
	That is not proper protection for people in this country. If we were sensible, we would say to the US Government, "Look, given that you haven't ratified the treaty, we must look again at its terms. This time, we shall protect the interests of British citizens and apply the sort of tests that American Congressmen apply as a matter of course, even if they are not part of the provisions of the constitution." The minimum American requirement of probable cause is not so very different from our requirement of prima facie evidence, but we have thrown away all that protection for British citizens because it seemed a good idea at the time. The aim was to please an American Administration who have not yet been prepared to put the treaty through the American legislature.
	The Government are in a shameful position, and we were right to reject the proposal when it first came before us. We are right to support the new clause, which would bring an end to an asymmetric arrangement of no benefit to the UK.

Michael Howard: I begin by welcoming the Minister to his new responsibilities. Far be it from me to give him advice, but I assure him that the Home Office need not be a dysfunctional Department. I wish him well as he discharges his new responsibilities.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve), the shadow Attorney-General, has expressed the widely shared reservations on this issue with his usual admirable clarity. That will enable me to be relatively brief in adding my voice to those who have expressed concern about the matter.
	On 31 March 2003, the day that the treaty was signed, the then Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett), made a written statement to the House. He said:
	"Before the treaty can come into force it needs to be ratified by the United States Senate"—[ Official Report, 31 March 2003; Vol. 402, c. 42WS.]
	The Lord Chancellor gave a similar assurance in another place. However, the provisions of the Extradition Act 2003 and the associated secondary legislation mean that those assurance have turned out to be completely worthless. This afternoon, the House has the opportunity to hold the Government to their word. If we are to take seriously our central responsibility of safeguarding the liberties of the individual against unfair, arbitrary or oppressive action by the Executive, we will seize that opportunity.
	It is difficult to imagine a more one-sided or unfair set of arrangements than those in existence at present. The treaty is itself one-sided: its effect, and that of the Act, is to lower substantially the requirements that the United States Government have to satisfy to secure the extradition of those who are accused of offences under United States law. What was previously reciprocal and similar has become unbalanced and one-sided.
	Today, we have the opportunity to put things right. As we have heard, the United States Senate has still to ratify the treaty. In plain language, the United States has not honoured its side of the deal: the ratification legislation is stuck in the Senate and shows no sign whatever of getting unstuck. That is hardly surprising, because as my hon. Friend pointed out, the United Kingdom has removed any incentive for the Senate to proceed. If, to gain the advantage that the treaty would, and the Act does, confer on the Government of the United States, the treaty had to be ratified by the US, it is a fair bet that more progress would have been made. By designating the United States, for the purpose of the Act, without the minimal degree of reciprocity that ratification would provide, the Government of the United Kingdom have surrendered the only lever of influence they possessed to secure what we assume is their objective.
	Fortunately, the House has the opportunity today to do what the Government themselves should have done. New clause 8 would remove the United States of America from the list of territories in paragraph 3(2) of the designation order and that would give the US Senate the incentive it needs. If and when the treaty is ratified the matter could be looked at again and the US could be restored to the list, as a subsequent amendment provides.
	I hope that the delay that the passage of new clause 8 would achieve would enable a fresh look to be taken at the arrangements in the treaty so that they can be revised. As has been said more than once, the arrangements are one-sided, and my hon. Friend has explained why. Some of the cases that have arisen since the Act came into force in that one-sided way have given rise to widespread concern.
	In Committee, the Minister's predecessor asked why the United States was being singled out for expressions of concern. I refer not to the hon. Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint)—now a Minister of State at the Department of Health—who was in the Chamber briefly a few moments ago, but to another former Home Office Minister, the right hon. Member for Salford (Hazel Blears), who is now Minister without Portfolio. The answer to the right hon. Lady's question is simple and twofold. First, as far as I am aware, no cases in respect of other jurisdictions have led to the same concerns. The proof of any legislative pudding is in the eating; it is in respect of the arrangements with the United States that cases of concern have arisen. That is no accident, and it brings me to the second point, to which my hon. Friend and the Liberal Democrat spokesman referred.
	The United States has a particular view on extraterritoriality. It claims for itself jurisdiction over acts that have not been committed in the United States and for which other countries, including ours, would make no similar claim. That should mean that any arrangements for extradition with the US need to be scrutinised with great care if the liberties of Her Majesty's subjects are not to be jeopardised.
	To make those points is not in any sense to be anti-American, and it was unworthy of the Minister's predecessor to make silly allegations of that kind in Committee. Some Opposition Members—I certainly include myself in this—have devoted a lifetime of energy to the improvement of relations between this country and the United States. That objective is not well served by the current unbalanced extradition arrangements between our two countries. Indeed, if they are allowed to continue they are likely to do significant damage to that relationship. I hope the House will make good use of the opportunity before us today to minimise that damage by restoring a degree of equity to the arrangements for extradition between our two countries.

John Maples: I rise to support everything that has been said by the three Members who have spoken. My hon. Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) made the speech that I should have liked to make in the debate. He covered the issues lucidly and made his points persuasively, and I should simply like to add some brief remarks.
	First, I want to put things in context. Until 11 September 2001, we were pretty relaxed about extradition. Cases were dragging through our courts, where the French had requested the extradition of someone whom they thought was involved in the Paris metro bombings. The Americans had also requested the extradition of three people whom they thought were involved in the east African embassy bombings. Those cases were strung out through our courts. No one in the Government seemed at all worried about the fact that Rachid Ramda had been in prison for six and half years by then. I think that he has now finally been sent to France. I do not think that the three people whom the United States wanted have been sent there. No one in the Government—or, I agree, in the Opposition for that matter—was particularly worried about that at the time.
	Since 9/11, we seem to have gone into a panic. We have all signed up to the European arrest warrant, which has thrown out of the window all sorts of protections that we have had for ages, and we have apparently done the same with the United States. I simply do not understand why. I can understand that we needed far faster extradition proceedings, particularly in terrorism cases, because we were all very worried about them, but in the process we have thrown out all sorts of common law protections that have existed for absolutely ages, including dual criminality and the prima facie rule.
	There were two occasions on which the Home Secretary had to agree to the proceedings going ahead, each of which was subject to two appeals. I forget how many stages that process involved—seven or eight in the end—but they are reason why such cases often took so long. But why did we have to throw out all the existing protections? There was a perfectly good reason for dual criminality, and we have retained it in the treaty with the United States and in the European arrest warrant for those offences that are not included in the treaty list. I accept that we gave up the prima facie rule under an earlier Council of Europe treaty with our European partners and neighbours, but there was a backstop in that, at the end of the day, the Home Secretary was entitled to ask whether it was in the interest of justice that such rules could be disapplied. Various legal protections were built in.
	I can understand the case for eliminating some of the protections. Perhaps the Home Secretary's discretion should have related to some fairly narrow points—the interest of justice, for instance—and perhaps he should have been able to exercise that discretion only once. Perhaps the prima facie rule could have been done away with in some cases. I have, however, always been worried about doing away with dual criminality. I do not understand how someone can be extradited from this country and prosecuted in another country if what they did was not an offence here at the time. However, we have now got ourselves into that position with the United States through the backdoor by allowing the prima facie evidence rule to be eroded. In so doing, we have effectively eroded the dual criminality rule as well.
	I do not understand why we went into a panic in September 2001, which resulted in the European arrest warrant, the treaty with the United States and the Extradition Act 2003. Many hon. Members made a great many of those points in considering the European arrest warrant and the Bill in Committee, but the Government were deaf to those arguments.
	Secondly, I want to deal with the US position. We got to this point as a result of bad negotiation, quite frankly. The Government did not foresee that the United States might not ratify the treaty. Anyone who has watched its refusal to extradite IRA terrorists over the past 30 years surely cannot be surprised that that is the main reason why ratification is being held up in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by a couple of Senators, probably from New York and Massachusetts, who do not want to risk former terrorists who may still be living peacefully in San Francisco or somewhere else being extradited back here. If we did not foresee that, it is a terrible mistake, but if we did, why did we not build into the treaty something to deal with it—or why cannot we do so now? If that is the problem, why cannot we try to renegotiate the treaty now.
	As my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) said, the United States now has no incentive to ratify the treaty. What bothers me is that all this is set in the context of a lot of other issues. No Conservative Member, possibly barring my right hon. and learned Friend, could be more pro-American than I am, but I am deeply concerned that we have allowed ourselves to be put in the position not just of a junior partner, but one without any influence.
	There is a raft of things on which we are not getting what we want from the United States—the international traffic in arms regulations waiver, the second engine on, and the guarantee of the order for, the joint strike fighter, as well as the ratification of the treaty. I go to Washington about once or twice a year, and many of those things have been on that list for about nine or 10 years, and the Americans keep saying that something is happening, but it does not.
	The fact is that the Government are not taken seriously because they are lousy at negotiating. They give away their position up front and do not retain any cards to play at the end of the game when things get difficult. That is what has happened in this case. The Minister is new to the job and I ask him to think seriously about the points that have been made. I hope that he is listening, because I do not think that this is a party political issue.

John Maples: I am sorry. I was looking at the wrong Minister. Perhaps she is not so new to the job. I ask her to think seriously about this issue, because British citizens are being put at risk of serious injustice. The case of Ian Norris involves price fixing, which was not a criminal offence here at the time when he committed it. If the dual criminality rule were properly applied, he could not be extradited to the United States for it. However, because the United States can pick up on an offence for which there is dual criminality and charge him with that, it can apply the weak prima facie evidence test that is now in the treaty.
	I suggest that, inadvertently, the treaty with the United States and the Extradition Act 2003 are resulting in—and will continue to result in—serious miscarriages of justice in which innocent British citizens are put through extradition and a court procedure in the United States that they should not be put through. If the proper protections were in place, they would not be put through that. The Government must be galled that the United States Senate refuses to ratify the treaty, but they have it in their hands to accept the amendments, or something like them, and simply put the favourable treatment that the United States gets on hold—in abeyance, in escrow, or whatever one wants to call it—until the United States performs its side of the bargain. We would not have so much trouble then. However, I suspect that the United States will not ever implement its side of the bargain and that at some point we will have to renegotiate if we want to get the United States to sign up to a new treaty. Perhaps the sooner we get there, the better.
	In pursuit of the interests of justice, I hope that the Government will consider the matter again. They should not feel that it would be a terrible climbdown or loss of political machoism to admit that a mistake has been made. They can blame the United States. They need to find some way out of the problem that we have been led into by the Extradition Act 2003.

Mark Pritchard: I rise to support the new clause that has been tabled by my right hon. and hon. Friends. We can understand why the Government have introduced a new extradition regime. The events of 9/11 are an important political context. I think that we would all agree that extradition laws needed to be updated and speeded up. However, that has been done at the cost of explicit due process, equity and fairness. Many critics of the treaty with the United States quite rightly cite the lack of reciprocity, which we have heard mentioned many times in the Chamber today. They suggest that the treaty is unbalanced, unfair and leaves UK citizens at a great disadvantage compared with US citizens. They are right. Unless the legislation is amended, UK business men and citizens will become increasingly vulnerable to over-zealous and extraterritorial US prosecutors.
	There is inequity not only in the process, but in the application of the law. It cannot be right that UK citizens alleged to have committed crimes in the United Kingdom, with perhaps the vaguest of links to any criminal activity in the United States, can be extradited without the requirement for prima facie evidence. In many cases, we no longer have physical borders when it comes to white-collar crime. Cybercrime and commercial crime through the internet is increasing. We need to be mindful of that. Nevertheless, cases need to be driven by evidence.
	Like the UK, the US should be required to provide evidence amounting to probable cause. Instead, the Government have created an extradition regime that has lowered the evidence threshold for the United States authorities alone. They have entered into an agreement that allows the US authorities to use extradition powers that perhaps go far beyond what the Government originally envisaged—to be fair to them.
	I would like, if I may, to ask the Minister on a point of law whether the 2003 extradition treaty is actually ratified. We know that the 1972 treaty was ratified here in the United Kingdom and in the United States, but the 2003 treaty was ratified in the United Kingdom, but not in the United States. Was the treaty ratified? There are 44 cases involving people who might go to the United States, and I believe that 12 UK citizens have already left the country and gone to the US. If the treaty has not been ratified, is there not a case to say that the Government or the judicial process have acted ultra vires, or beyond their legal powers? There might be a strong case to answer on that, and I would be interested if the great legal minds in the House would like to advise me on the matter either inside or outside the Chamber.
	As my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) rightly said in his most excellent speech, there are many friends of the United States on both sides of the House. I declare an interest because my wife is a US citizen. However, we need to move to a position at which there is equity, fairness and reciprocity so that US-UK relations are safeguarded.

Joan Ryan: It is with pride that I rise to speak at the Dispatch Box for the first time for my Government. I am especially pleased to be facing the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) and to be in the Chamber with many other hon. Members, both in front of me and behind me, with whom I have long worked on Home Office matters. However, I have not been able to use my voice on these issues, certainly for the past four years, so I hope that I will use it well on this occasion and others to come.
	Government amendments Nos. 66 to 71, 78 and 79 are largely technical in nature. Government amendments Nos. 66 and 67 simply correct a drafting flaw in the Extradition Act 2003 to ensure that it reflects the devolution settlement.
	Paragraph 21 of schedule 14 of the Bill would extend legislative powers to allow time served abroad on remand while awaiting extradition to the UK to count towards a person's sentence. In practice, judges usually deduct time served abroad from sentences, but we had intended to take this opportunity to reflect the practice in legislation. However, on closer inspection, and bearing in mind recent changes to our domestic sentencing law, the provisions in paragraph 21 of schedule 14 do not close the technical gaps that we have identified in legislation relating to offenders who are convicted before, but sentenced after, extradition, and to certain juveniles. It became clear that paragraph 21 required amendment. Indeed, we have concluded that it would be better to omit paragraph 21 and its associated provisions and start again. The area of law is complex and it has taken further reflection to get an amendment right. Government amendment No. 69 ensures that the power to give credit for time served pending extradition applies equally to all, regardless of when the offender is convicted or sentenced in the UK, and regardless of the offender's age.
	Let me turn to the amendments tabled by the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (David Davis) and new clause 8. I should say at the outset that many Labour Members will be surprised by the content and tone of Conservative Members' remarks. I will explain why during the course of my speech and attempt to respond to the points that have been raised. However, I ask Conservative Members to bear in mind the limited time at my disposal today, because we wish to allow time for all Back Benchers to have a full opportunity to contribute.
	New clause 8 is perhaps the most surprising of the amendments and new clauses that have been tabled to this part of the Bill. We do not recall the official Opposition taking quite the same attitude to our extradition arrangements with the United States when the relevant legislation was debated in Parliament. They are now revealing a deep distrust of one of our longest and most trusted extradition partners. We look back to the Act of 2003. Conservative Members expressed shrill opposition to the European arrest warrant, which has proved its worth. We no longer hear that opposition. It seems that Conservative Members go about seeking their enemies. It is clear that—

Joan Ryan: I will give way in a moment.
	We have before us a better and faster approach to extradition. Among the provisions was secondary legislation to designate those countries that do not need prima facie evidence. Those countries, some of which I have listed, are in category 2 for extradition consideration. As regards the removal of the prima facie requirement, that was possible long before the 2003 Act came into force. The possibility dates back to when the Opposition were in Government in 1991, when the UK became an active party to the European convention on extradition.

Joan Ryan: I will give way in a moment.
	Members to the convention do not require prima facie evidence from one another. By the end of 2003, the convention applied between almost all European states. We have heard the convention praised by Conservative Members. It applied to almost all European states, including Russia and other former Soviet states, which are all members of the Council of Europe, as well as to Israel and South Africa. The convention still applies to our extradition arrangements with all of these states except for those which have joined the European Union, with which we operate the European arrest warrant mechanism.
	I now give way to the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard).

Dominic Grieve: Why did we embark on a treaty revision with the United States if we could have proceeded on the basis of what she has said, and given the US what it wanted? We embarked on that revision, because we believed that we could benefit from concessions by the United States. Surely, that is the basis of trust, but trust cannot be maintained without reciprocity. Furthermore, as the Minister well knows, while some aspects of the US legal system seek justice, they can be onerous and the extra-territoriality of US jurisdiction is quite extraordinary.

Dominic Grieve: Although I warmly welcome the Minister's arrival at the Dispatch Box, I cannot welcome her words this afternoon. She has failed completely to meet the issues that have been raised. She suggested that asking judges to consider the question of forum is in some way wrong. Judges deal with abuse of process applications frequently. It is perfectly within their competence to do so. I find incomprehensible her misunderstanding of the issues concerning the United States, our friend and ally. If we want to maintain friendship and alliance, reciprocity is the basis.
	 It being Six o'clock, mr. deputy speaker  put forthwith the Question already proposed from the Chair, pursuant to Order [6 March].

Dominic Grieve: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. You may well say that what I am about to do is to make a point of frustration, rather than a point of order. However, the frustration is not just mine; it is shared by the House as a whole. The whole of part 4 has not been discussed today, as a result of the tight timetable that the Government have imposed on the House. Is there any way in which you, Sir, can advise the other place that this House has been unable to do its duty to the Bill in relation to part 4, which deals not with just some ordinary issue of party political debate, but with a matter of great importance: the inspectorate of prisons and of other Government services? Could you perhaps tell your counterparts in the other place that they need to do an awful lot of work to ensure that this Bill receives the proper scrutiny that it deserves?

Mr. Speaker: It takes me all my time to advise this House, without extending my advice to the other place. The hon. Gentleman will know that the programme motion was agreed to by the House, so I am bound by it. I know the frustration and difficulties to which he refers.
	 Order for Third Reading read.

Liam Byrne: I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.
	In concluding our debates on the measures before us, I want to put on the record my gratitude, and that of my Front-Bench colleagues, for the extraordinary contributions made by my right hon. Friends the Member for Norwich, South (Mr. Clarke) and the Minister without Portfolio, and my hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale, East (Paul Goggins), now Under-Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. They advanced not only this Bill but an entire agenda of security, peace and safety that is already making a substantive difference to the communities we serve. The Bill strengthens the spine of policing in this country in a new century. It contains measures that deal with international justice, national support, force effectiveness and command unit power, and which provide a new step up for neighbourhood policing.
	Yesterday, in the space of one afternoon, I had the privilege of seeing how policing is changing across that entire domain. At the commendation ceremony led by the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, the Home Secretary and I heard at first hand of the courage and devotion of officers in tackling an international threat that mobilised an entire country in response; that response was delivered through the force of the Metropolitan police. As I left that ceremony in the afternoon, I was lucky enough to meet Chief Superintendent Mark Ricketts, the borough commander of Barnet, and his neighbourhood officers, who, using the new investment in neighbourhood policing and new neighbourhood policing methods, in which we have put such trust and such investment, have cut crime in one ward by 17 per cent. in a year.
	What unites these stories is the professionalism, innovation, dedication to duty and passion to change our community that lives and breathes in every serving officer in today's police. This Bill gives strength to those men and women and the teams they serve in, at every level and in every area of their operations. The provisions in the Bill will, at one end of the spectrum, help combat the antisocial behaviour that is the scourge of many neighbourhoods and, at the other end, enhance international co-operation in the battle against 21st century crimes such as computer hacking.
	Internationally, crime is changing. A new alliance between failed states and criminality will foster new threats to us. We must prepare and respond. The provisions of the Bill do not touch on arrangements between the US and the UK, but they do make important improvements to our extradition regime, which should, I believe, be welcomed by both sides of the House.
	Much of the debate so far has been characterised, as we saw again this afternoon, by myths and misunderstandings about the arrangements, compounded by some currently high-profile, but individual cases. As ever, we are ready to have a rational debate on these issues, but it needs to be on the basis of the facts, not on spurious assertions.
	Nationally, there is much more we must and will do to support police effectiveness. Key to the future will be the establishment of the National Policing Improvement Agency, which will drive improvements in policing. The agency will be police "owned" and led. The creation of the NPIA will deliver a rationalised and more dynamic national landscape. It will give the police service the capability to deliver the mission-critical priorities set out in the annual national community safety plan, including the rollout of neighbourhood policing and full implementation of the recommendations of the Bichard inquiry.
	Regionally, there are measures that we must take if we are to respond to the findings of Her Majesty's inspector of constabulary that too few forces have the resilience to tackle terrorism and organised crime. We cannot and will not fail to act in the light of those conclusions.
	At times, the debate about police reform has overshadowed many of the proposals in the Bill. Of course, this Bill does not provide for the amalgamation of forces—for that we are following procedures set down by a previous Administration in the Police Act 1996. The amendments to schedule 2 adopted today, however, will help to ensure that strategic authorities can conduct their business effectively and that strategic forces have sufficient command resilience.
	Locally, too, this Bill takes our agenda forward. The Bill will underpin much stronger partnerships in networks that make a difference, including networks with local communities. The accountability framework for police forces and their community safety partners will be rendered more robust and more responsive to the voice of the citizen.
	We recognise that accountability is essential to the future effectiveness of the police. The Bill therefore seeks to strengthen the role of police authorities, first by ensuring that their members have the skills and experience necessary to undertake the challenging role that they perform and, second, by conferring on authorities an express duty to hold the chief officer to account.
	The Bill will also strengthen the effectiveness of crime and disorder reduction partnerships, and their equivalent partnerships in Wales, in addressing local community safety priorities, and it will ensure that the citizen can raise areas of concern through the community call for action.
	Finally, these changes frame the important stage for so many of us, which is the return of neighbourhood policing. These reforms are being implemented against the backdrop of our commitment to roll out neighbourhood policing in every community by April 2007. The embedding of neighbourhood policing teams will ensure that policing continues to be delivered locally, by officers and police staff working in local communities and responding to their community safety priorities.
	The Bill will ensure that the police and the wider policing family have the powers they need to tackle crime and antisocial behaviour effectively. At neighbourhood level, community support officers will have a standard set of powers so that they can play their full part in neighbourhood policing. Safer communities cannot be achieved by the Government, or the police service, alone. Ultimately, people will feel safe and secure only when everyone behaves in a respectful way. That is why the drive behind the respect campaign is so important, and I am therefore very pleased that the Bill takes forward some of the key measures in the respect action plan. I am very glad that many of the Bill's provisions, such as the new truancy power for CSOs, the community call for action and the extension of parenting contracts and orders, have been broadly welcomed.
	Finally, let me underline that, by making these changes, we wish to strengthen the tripartite relationship that so distinguishes the British service. It has always been the responsibility of Government to set the overall framework and the strategic priorities for policing. That is the Home Secretary's traditional role in the tripartite relationship. We seek to make the Government as effective a partner as possible in that relationship in future, but we want all partners in the tripartite relationship to be equipped to fulfil their role in meeting the challenge of delivering the high-quality policing that the public rightly expect and deserve.
	I very much welcome the good-natured contributions made by the hon. Members for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) and for Hornsey and Wood Green (Lynne Featherstone). I know that the Minister without Portfolio would want to associate herself with those sentiments. We have improved the Bill during our deliberations, and I have no hesitation in commending it to the House and wishing it a speedy passage in another place.

Nick Herbert: The central premise of the Bill is that Ministers believe that they know what is best for local communities. They make the mistake of thinking that extending Government control over policing will cause standards to rise. If the Government had a record of excellence in administration, the people might be willing to trust them in the matter, but they do not: the Home Office is a shambles, and the National Audit Office has failed to sign off on its accounts. In addition, there have been the catastrophic failures to deport foreign offenders and to deal with offenders on release from prison.
	What is in the Government's record that makes them think that they will do a better job of running the police than police authorities or forces? The centralising measures in the Bill are clear, and include new powers for the Home Secretary to shape police authorities and to intervene in them. The powers of CSOs will be standardised, and the National Policing Improvement Agency created.
	On the other side of the equation, there are very few decentralising measures. The only one that I can see is the community call for action, but the former police Minister said that that involved powers of last resort and that it was not a
	"mainstream way of doing business."
	We had real concerns about some of the proposals in the Bill. They include the extension of summary justice, which we debated this afternoon, and the combined inspectorate of justice, communities, safety and custody. As my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Mr. Garnier) noted in a point of order before this debate, we did not discuss that latter provision this afternoon. Thus, the timetable for this Bill denied debate on a very important matter that is causing wide concern outside the House, especially in relation to the prisons inspectorate. There is concern about that inspectorate's independence and the calibre of the inspector himself. In addition, the need to inspect prisons is a special case, as it is important to ensure that performance targets are met and human rights observed. We will have to leave to another place all those serious matters, which were barely discussed in Committee.
	We tried to improve the Bill with amendments that would have made it clear that the Home Secretary should intervene in police authorities only as a last resort and given chief constables more discretion over the powers of CSOs. They were rejected, as was every Conservative and Liberal Democrat amendment. Although the Minister said that he thought that the Bill had been improved—I accept that our debate has been good natured—the truth is that the Government have not accepted a single Opposition amendment. I recognise that the Government exhibited good will in relation to the amendment on child protection measures tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Castle Point (Bob Spink), but that is the exception that proves the rule.
	Local accountability is being weakened. Policing in this country emerged from localities, and that is where it must surely remain if it is to retain legitimacy and consent.
	A distinguished former Member of the House, Tony Benn, set three tests for institutions. He asked: who has power, where does it come from, and how does the citizen call an institution to account? Being able to communicate with local policing teams is no substitute for a proper link between citizens and chief constables. This Bill, together with police force amalgamation, seriously weakens that link. I therefore regret very much that we have been unable to improve it.
	There is just enough in the Bill for us not to want to oppose it outright; in particular, there are the provisions on computer misuse and the forfeiture of indecent photographs of children. But that was a finely balanced decision on our part, and I regret that we have not had more opportunities to debate some of the more contentious measures.
	In conclusion, the chief constable of West Yorkshire police, who speaks for the Association of Chief Police Officers on constitutional issues has said that the Bill
	"represents a centralisation of power over policing, which has never been experienced in this country since the founding of modern policing in 1829".
	I emphasise that he is the spokesman for ACPO on the matter. We know, because the Minister confirmed it, that the Government are planning to introduce a national policing board with the Home Secretary in the chair. Let us be clear—

Lynne Featherstone: Our debates on the Bill have been good natured, especially in Committee, and some interesting amendments were proposed. Unfortunately, the Government took none of them on board, although I have to correct the hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) in one respect. The former Minister produced the same version of our amendment on computer hacking but it was very cold comfort in a Bill that will give the Home Secretary the biggest ever centralisation of power over the police.
	Why were the Labour Government so unmoving on provisions that were eminently sensible and obvious to the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives? With their complete centralisation of power, the Government seem to be getting tenser and tenser. Their grip on control is the result of fear. It has nothing to do with winning the arguments; it is fear of headlines. They need to legislate and intervene—to be seen to be active—rather than really getting to the bottom of a problem, or allowing the democratic processes of accountability and the police to do their job properly. There is a complete undermining of professional opinion and practice, which will spiral down and bring less effective and less local policing.
	I object strongly to the doublespeak that the measure is about localism and local policing. In fact, it will bring a sweeping centralisation of power, such as we have never seen.
	It is a great tragedy that we did not have time to debate the inspectorates. The changes to the prison inspectorate hold dangers for prisoners in future. That inspectorate casts a light where no light shines through its expertise and independence, both of which will be compromised in a joint inspectorate. The chief inspector of prisons, Anne Owers, said that it would be a dilution of all the special protection for prisoners. Well trained prison inspectors can spot human rights abuses in a way that will not be possible if the inspectorates are merged. I am sorry that we did not have time to discuss a joint amendment to provide that prisons were not included. Prisoners need special arrangements to protect them.
	Sadly, we are now dependent on the other place put into the Bill all the proposals that the Government would not accept—amendment after amendment. Although the debate has been informative and interesting, it has not been at all rewarding for Liberal Democrats. We tried to work with the Government but all our good work and good intentions were rejected, so it is with a heavy heart that I leave it to the other place to make amends.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	 Bill accordingly read the Third time, and passed.

Richard Shepherd: I am glad that the very point is reinforced by what the hon. Gentleman says, because of course a generalised statement is not a detailed policy, so the consent to the general proposition does not of itself mean consent to the interpretation of what that general proposition means. I always explain that to my constituents by saying that the Government propose—it is in our manifesto—to build a new road to Birmingham, let us say, and we all say, "Hurray!"

David Taylor: A out road out of Birmingham!

Simon Hughes: I want to clarify an implication of what the hon. Gentleman generously said about my colleagues and I. We did not sign up to the division of members of the Committee because we wanted to argue in support of it. We were told that the Committee's composition would have to follow the balance of numbers in the House, which is why it will consist of seven Government Members, three Conservative Members, one Liberal Democrat Member and no others. We certainly retain, as he would, our unhappiness about the balance and representation. I understand that the same procedure is applied in the Lords, although the numbers are different because the balance is different.

Richard Shepherd: I greatly respect the hon. Gentleman. I cast no aspersions on the names that have been listed. It is the process by which the names arrived on the Order Paper that worries me.
	It is said that reasonable men can find a consensus. I have fear at the very thought that reasonable men—remember who we are dealing with—will inform us on how the House of Lords is shaped. I am not sure whether there is an interrelationship after what the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) has said. If that is the way we are proceeding, I am alarmed. The constitutional settlement of what the House of Lords should be would normally enable that place to determine its own standing orders and its relationship with this place. That is what we understood as politics—reasonable men negotiating from a position of strength, not a neutered Second Chamber.

Jack Straw: The hon. Gentleman says from a sedentary position that the appetite is insatiable. I hope that it is not quite insatiable; otherwise there will never be any change. Meanwhile, for the reasons that I have explained, and that others have elaborated, I hope that the motion will enjoy unanimous support from the House, and I commend it.

Theresa May: My personal view is that it is doubtful whether it will be able to codify in a way that would retain the flexibility that I consider necessary. I shall deal with that point shortly, because I think that we should take it into account when examining the rather tricky role that the Committee will have to play.
	The Committee is not being asked to decide whether certain conventions should be scrapped or amended, or indeed what the powers of the two Houses should be. The motion simply asks it to "consider the practicality" of codifying its role. It is, however, understandable that some Members have—in the words of my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr. Shepherd)—smelt a rat, because the commitment in the Labour party manifesto on which the establishment of the Committee is based goes further. Having stated
	"we will seek agreement on codifying the key conventions of the Lords",
	it continues
	"and developing alternative forms of scrutiny that complement rather than replicate those of the Commons; the review should also explore how the Upper Chamber might offer a better route for public engagement in scrutiny and policy-making. We will legislate to place reasonable limits on the time Bills spend in the second chamber—no longer than 60 sitting days for most Bills.
	As part of the process of modernisation, we will remove the remaining hereditary peers and allow a free vote on the composition of the House."
	So the manifesto commitment on which the motion is based goes considerably further than the motion.

Andrew Miller: Just to put to rest the mind of the hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow), I was familiar last week with the broad terms of reference, although not the specific wording. Nothing in the wording gives me cause for concern about my role as I understood it.

Theresa May: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that clarification.
	I want to move beyond the wording of the motion and on to the issues that lie behind this project, the first of which is the problem of definition and codification. There is a danger that codification could remove the flexible relationship between the two Houses that enables better governance. Indeed, in some cases, such a relationship enables the Government to pass business that would be difficult to get through if the codification was as suggested in the Labour party manifesto.
	Let us consider the example of the planning and compulsory purchase legislation that, at one stage, the Government were on the verge of losing because of the incompetence of the former Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. Agreements were reached in the House of Lords on progressing that legislation in such a way as to ensure its enactment. If the rules had been absolute, that would not have been possible, which is one reason why I said earlier to the hon. Member for Rhondda that it is very difficult to codify, while at the same time providing the necessary flexibility in the relationship between the two Houses, in the interest of getting legislation through Parliament.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr. Shepherd) made several good points with great passion, as he always does, especially on issues relating to the constitution and Parliament. He talked about the problem of defining manifesto commitments, and he was right. It is one of the greatest problems that the Committee will face when considering the Salisbury-Addison convention. One example is the recent debate on the Identity Cards Act 2006, in which the Labour party's commitment to voluntary identity cards was challenged by the Opposition, because we believed that the manner in which they would be introduced effectively meant that they would be compulsory—because of the increasing requirement to hold a passport. If an identity card becomes automatic on having a passport, holding the identity card effectively becomes compulsory. That was a debate on the definitions of voluntary and compulsory in this House, and it shows how difficult it will be to define manifesto commitments, as the hon. Member for North-West Leicestershire (David Taylor) made clear by quoting his party's manifesto. Manifestos are often drawn very wide, so it is difficult for anyone to say exactly what was meant in terms of legislation. The danger is that codification will mean that decisions as to what such manifesto commitments mean are not taken by elected representatives in this House, but are left to lawyers, who will have to find a way through the problems caused by trying to codify the conventions. The Committee will face real difficulties in attempting such codification.
	Why has this issue come up now, juxtaposed as it is with the whole question of House of Lords reform, including the intervention by Lord Falconer? The problem is that it is a circular argument. The hon. Member for Rhondda said that form should follow function, but the problem is that function may be determined by form in relation to the House of Lords. The functions that one would anticipate an elected House undertaking would be very different from the sort of functions that one would anticipate an unelected House undertaking. Therefore, if one identified the function and then fit the form to it, the function might change once the form had been decided. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will say that one has to break the circular argument at some point, but in this instance the function of the House of Lords will be determined by the form of the House of Lords.

John Bercow: There is often an underlying assumption in these debates that a legislative stalemate between the two Houses is necessarily a bad thing, to be avoided if at all possible, whereas I believe that, in many situations, it is a positive good to be celebrated. May I put to the hon. Gentleman that, in referring as he did to functions of scrutiny and review but with assumption of primacy for this Chamber in the end, it is important not to exclude the importance of delay as a positive good, not to avoid an ultimate decision, but precisely to slow up the process for further such review and scrutiny?

David Heath: Any thoughts that this might be a brief or perfunctory debate have been adequately dispelled already. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright), with whom I agree on many of these matters. I want to challenge the Leader of the House on two details of what he had to say. I think that he made an uncharacteristic slip of the tongue when he introduced the motion in his name and that of his right hon. Friends. Of course, he has no right hon. Friends in this instance. He was introducing the motion as Leader of the House—his new role. He is speaking on behalf of not the Government, not the House. That is an important distinction and I know that he understands it.
	Secondly, I want to chide him about the fact that he appears not to have been sufficiently assiduous in studying Liberal Democrat manifestos over recent years and was unable to quote from them. I know that he has had limited reading time in his new role, but I am sure that he will rectify that omission. If he is not able to do so, I refer him to the Parliament Act 1911 and its preamble. I do not think that we have largely changed our view about reform of the upper House. The tragedy is that it has taken so long for something to be done about it.
	It is no secret that we were extremely reluctant to enter into the arrangements before us today on this particular Joint Committee. We were worried when the idea was first suggested by the Lord President of the Council because, at that time, it was proposed in isolation. There was no suggestion that we would make further progress on reform of the upper House, or that the Committee would form part of an integrated approach on the whole question of the relationship between the Houses. It was predicated on an assertion by the Prime Minister in an unguarded moment that he wished to clip the wings of the Lords. He was expressing irritation, which is frequently shared by Ministers and Government Back Benchers, that the House of Lords occasionally does not do exactly what the Government wish it to do when considering Bills.
	I say hallelujah to the fact that the House of Lords does not do what the Government want it to do because even in its present illegitimate form, it has a substantial amount of not only expertise, but, more importantly, independence from the Executive. That enables it to take a view on matters put before it and to express a view that often hugely improves legislation. Over the past few years, I have dealt with countless Home Office and Department for Constitutional Affairs Bills on which the views of the Lords, as a revising Chamber, have been invaluable when we have tried to avoid the worst excesses of sloppy legislation that is not only internally discordant, but has a profound effect on the liberties of this country's citizens. The view that formed the basis of the original proposal for the Committee, which was that there was somehow a need to reduce the power of the Lords because it was an inconvenience to the Government, is one that we wish to resist.
	An even worse suggestion was that the Government at the time wished not only to reduce the powers of the Lords, but, simultaneously, to complete their initial process of reform by removing the remaining hereditaries. I hold no candle whatsoever for the retention of the hereditaries in the Lords. People should not be Members of the House of Lords by accident of birth. I am convinced that whether they are elected by their colleagues or not, they do not have a legitimate part in a modern legislature. However, the effect of what the Government appeared to be proposing would have been first to reduce the powers of the Lords and, secondly, to make it exactly the fully appointed Chamber that this House had rejected conclusively—so much for the primacy of the House of Commons.

David Heath: The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. That is why the option of an appointed House would not improve the legitimacy of the Lords one wit. It is also why many of us are convinced—this is certainly my party's position—that an elected, or predominantly elected, House must be the right way forward.
	Having said that the present composition and certainly the composition envisaged, I think, by elements within the Government are illegitimate, as we have heard from the hon. Member for Cannock Chase, the House of Lords, even in its unreformed state, has utility. That is why it is appreciated by the public. That is not because they believe that its composition is justified or is arrived at by an appropriate means. The public see it doing its job in holding the Executive to account in a way that sometimes this place is incapable of doing.

Andrew Turner: When this debate began, I smelt a rat. My hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr. Shepherd) said that he smelt a rat, but the Leader of the House assured him that there was no rat. I have to say that the more I hear of this debate, the more I am convinced that there is a rat, although it might be a different rat from the one that I originally smelt.
	Everything hinges—as so many of these matters do—on what the motion means. My right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May) drew to our attention the terms of reference of the proposed Committee, which are
	"to consider the practicality of codifying the key conventions on the relationship between the two Houses of Parliament",
	so I shall not go over that territory again. I asked earlier what was meant by the word "codifying". I am now beginning to understand that it means more than simply writing down the conventions. It means writing them down as though they would acquire some force as a result of being written down. That seems to be the interpretation that many hon. Members on both sides are putting on the motion. I started by thinking that, while it would not be particularly constructive to approve the Committee, it would not be particularly damaging to do so either. However, I am now beginning to think that it might be damaging to approve the Committee, particularly if it takes its terms of reference as being to codify rather than merely to consider the practicality of codifying.
	The original rat that I smelt involved the development of the code in a way that the right hon. Member for Knowsley, North and Sefton, East (Mr. Howarth)—who is no longer in his place—described as discussing what was acceptable and what was not. That interpretation of the motion was shared by the hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Andrew Miller) when he said that he hoped to change the arrangements. The hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) then said something rather similar, with which the Leader of the House agreed. There was some confusion, certainly on the part of Labour Back Benchers, about the intention behind the motion. Perhaps that was because they had read their manifesto rather than the motion or, more likely, because they had read neither and simply accepted the assurances given to them by the Whips—if, indeed, they needed any assurances.
	So rat No. 1 involves the question of whether there is to be an interpretation and a further development of the conventions. Rat No. 2—a more recent and more lively rat, it has to be said—involves the question of whether codifying implies giving some kind of force to the conventions.
	A Committee of politicians is singularly ill suited to doing anything other than arguing about how things should develop. It is almost inconceivable that a group of right hon. and hon. Members of this House and noble Lords from another place will simply sit down and write down in an academic way what the present position is. There are two reasons for that. First, I do not think that there is much agreement on what the present position is. That is certainly true of some of the claimed key conventions set out on the Order Paper. Secondly, politicians much prefer mission creep. In fact, it is almost part of our nature to try to drag the debate into the areas in which we are interested, rather than the areas in which the Government, the Opposition Front Bench or even—dare I say it?—the House of Lords are interested. I am convinced that the rat of developing or trying to shape the future of the conventions is alive and well too; it might not be as smelly a rat as it was at the beginning, but that is because it is alive and well, not because it is not there.
	If we want a memorial of the existing codes, it would be far better to leave it to an academic to write down what the codes are, obtain evidence and set out lots of footnotes—I am sure that an academic would follow me. The only problem is that it would take far longer than two months for an academic to do that work. That is the other reason why I do not believe that this work can be done effectively, even by a full-time Committee sitting for two months. As we have heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr. Cash), there are a huge number of conventions and something like 1,100 years of history behind the development of Parliament and the relationships between its two Houses.
	As for whether the conventions exist, the Salisbury-Addison convention was of a different time, and as the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) said, it was between two parties that were in very different positions in the two Houses. Even the Government have moved from time to time from the strict interpretation of the Salisbury convention, as we have seen not only with the Identity Cards Bills but, more significantly, with the smoking-related elements of the Health Bill. Under the Salisbury convention, the House of Lords was entitled to throw out the smoking-related elements of the Bill on the basis that they were not what the Government were elected to introduce. The manifesto said one thing, and the Government said something else. The Government do not adhere to the Salisbury convention; more and more frequently, they submit what I suspect is the rather one-sided convention that the Government are entitled to get their business through, or that the elected House is entitled to have its decision upheld in another place.
	It is fair to say that my noble Friends on the Front Bench in the House of Lords have been careful to stick with the letter of the Salisbury convention, although I can sometimes detect a reluctance to do so. As far as I can tell, however, Liberal Democrat Members of the House of Lords are no longer signed up to the Salisbury convention, if they ever were. I do not see a reason to sign up to a convention between a hereditary House and an elected House when the elected House and the other House are in the exact form proposed by the Government. We have two Houses in a form that the Government, certainly at the time of invention—which in the case of the House of Lords was not long ago—approved of. Therefore, how can they conceivably argue that it is not doing the job that it was set up to do? I suspect that they did not know what job it was set up to do, and that they merely disagreed with its composition.
	In other words, in the early years of this Government, form did not follow function at all; form followed prejudice. Perhaps the prejudice was justifiable, and perhaps not. It seems to me, however, that we cannot decide on the future form of the House of Lords without agreeing what its function should be. I think that its function is pretty much right at the moment, although I would like to propose some improvements. However, most of those improvements would not be upheld—and even the current functions would not be improved—by reducing the appointed element and increasing the elected element of that House. The hon. Member for Somerton and Frome accepted the fact that a House cannot scrutinise well in detail if it consists of people like us. That is not our métier.
	Another key convention mentioned in the motion is the convention on secondary legislation, but that convention is under fire. I see no reason why a House of Lords in the form in which the Government created it should not have exactly the same ability to reject secondary legislation as we do. Indeed, I do not see why the House of Lords should not amend secondary legislation. Perhaps there are good reasons and perhaps there are not, but the House of Lords could perfectly well say, "If we are not allowed to amend it, we will reject it." If not the House of Lords in its current form, the House of Lords in a future form could wield over the Government the big stick of rejecting all secondary legislation that it wished to see not rejected but amended. That would be the only way of forcing the Government to introduce revised secondary legislation in a form that the House of Lords would find acceptable. The convention will change if the composition of the House of Lords changes. Indeed, it could change without a change in the composition of the House of Lords should noble Lords wish that to happen.
	I will say no more about the existing conventions, but there is an absence of conventions, and a deliberate—may I say—casting aside of conventions that worries me no end. Perhaps the Committee, if established, could examine the history of other conventions that have now disappeared.

Jack Straw: If the hon. Gentleman will allow me, I will not because, although I love him to bits, I know that he has an unrivalled ability to keep the House for a long time, which does not necessarily lead to the approbation of his colleagues.
	I thank the right hon. Member for Maidstone—[ Interruption.] I am sorry, I meant the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May). The right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe) was very effective in holding me to account when I was Home Secretary, which was good for me, although it did not always feel like that.
	The right hon. Member for Maidenhead asked whether the Committee could produce an interim report. My understanding is that it cannot make an interim report to the House without first coming back to the two Houses to change the 21 July deadline. It could then produce an interim report if it wanted to do so. We have debated the timetable and I hope that members of the Committee will be able to complete their work by the 21 July deadline, but if that is not possible the Chair of the Committee can come to see me and I shall do my best to respond positively to the Committee's requests. I cannot say more than that.
	The right hon. Lady's second point was about Lord Falconer's proposals for consensus. As the House knows, I have had responsibility for House of Lords reform and other easy matters, including party funding, only since last Friday, so Members will forgive me if I take a deep breath before looking at my noble Friend's proposals. I will take the opportunity to consult representatives of Opposition parties about what they feel to be the appropriate way forward before making decisions about how we progress the commitments.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase said that we needed a second Chamber that was neither a replica nor a rival. I agree, but the devil will be in finding a Chamber that complements the role of this place. The hon. Member for Cambridge suggested that it would not be a bad idea if the second Chamber were seen as a rival, but that would have serious problems for governance.
	The hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) used the word "concordat", which was probably right. Governance will work better, and always has worked better, when there is consensus about the balance about powers between each end. We must have that, whatever the composition and powers of the other place; otherwise, there really would be gridlock. On this occasion, it is for the Committee to consider whether it is possible to describe that concordat—that consensus—without turning it into the straitjacket of a Napoleonic code. If we get a draft recommendation that begins with the words "whereas" and "if", we know that the task is impossible.
	The hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Mr. Turner) may be suspicious about many things, but I would not be suspicious about this one. We have a manifesto commitment. This is a very tricky but very important issue. We must take it stage by stage. Perhaps I should not have set the hare running on how to codify the issue. I was simply describing, for the sake of completeness, what form codification could take. Of course, I will consider any recommendation from the Committee with very great care. Subject to that, the idea of legislating for the balance of powers between the two Houses would probably be the worst option, rather than the best.
	I hope that I have responded to the points made by the hon. Member for Cambridge.
	As for the hon. Member for Stone (Mr. Cash), I was about to say that he turned up like a bad penny, when I was dealing with Europe and followed me around on Europe. I finally ensured that the Government served up what he was demanding in respect of Europe—a referendum on the EU constitution—and no sooner was that over and we dealt with that, he turns up here. I wonder whether the Bruges group and all the other flat-earth societies to which he belongs on the issue of Europe had any idea whatsoever that he was, figuratively speaking, in bed with the French, with the Québecois. I also wonder how the devil William Cash & Co.—a very distinguished firm of lawyers—was instructed by the Québecois, rather than other perhaps more obvious firms; but perhaps for that, we can wait until the next debate. Meanwhile, I recommend the motion to the House.
	 Question put—
	Hon. Members: No.
	 Division deferred till Wednesday next, pursuant to Standing Order No.41A (Deferred divisions).

Co-operation on asylum policy and practice

Mark Tami: Matthew Marsden, a two-year-old boy from Buckley, Flintshire, tragically drowned while on a family holiday in August 2004. He drowned after falling into a duck pond that was just 18 in deep at Greenacres holiday caravan park near Porthmadog. The coroner recorded a verdict of accidental death. He described the death as a tragic accident and said it was natural for youngsters to show interest in water. He did not back calls from safety campaigners to fill in ponds on public sites such at this.
	That was not the first incident at the caravan park. A risk assessment was carried out in September 2003, but only after a four-year-old boy was saved from drowning in the same pond. People should clearly be aware of the dangers of water, but we need to take the appropriate action. I am not advocating a ban on all water features, which are part of the attraction of a park or leisure centre, but they need to be safe. Lessons have to be learned and action taken. We all know that water holds a particular fascination for young children—particularly under the age of five. Whether the water is held in a garden pond, a rainwater butt, a paddling pool or a bucket, a young child will always tend to want to investigate.
	Between 1 January 1993 and December 2003, 342 children under the age of 15 drowned in small bodies of water, canals, lakes, rivers and swimming pools in the UK. That figure does not include those who drowned in the bath at home or at coastal locations such as the beach. The highest single number of fatalities occurred among those aged about two. At that stage, toddlers have increased mobility, but their stability and co-ordination are still undeveloped, so they tend not to be able to help themselves if they get into difficulties. Some 111 children under the age of five have drowned during the last decade. That is within the space of a few minutes of the supervising adult being distracted for any particular reason.
	We need to readdress what constitutes a water hazard or danger. As adults, we tend to think of deep ponds, lakes, rivers, swimming pools and even the sea, but the facts tell us that young children can drown in as little as 1 in or 2 in of water. Wherever water can collect is therefore a potential hazard or danger. As children do not learn the concept of danger until they are about four or five, the onus is therefore on us to take appropriate action.
	The Marsden family know that they cannot turn the clock back, but they do not want their tragic loss to be another headline in the papers, forgotten the next day. They want lessons to be learned from it and action to be taken so that no other parents suffer as they have suffered and continue to suffer. Many would find that approach difficult to follow, but it is their hope and desire that nobody else will go through what they have experienced.
	The coroner's view, in essence, is that nobody was to blame, but, ultimately, we are all responsible because we have done little to protect children from water, or, at best, minimise the risk. Accidents will always happen, but our job and duty must ultimately be to minimise that risk. As a parent, I know that it is nearly impossible for any parent to supervise a young child 100 per cent. of the time, but action can be taken to lessen the risks, particularly in the case of water.
	Let me go into a bit of detail. There is no specific legislation regarding pond safety of this type. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents provides safety advice about ponds in schools, which are common-sense guidelines on how to supervise children near and around water and which apply to parents, teachers and guardians. Again, we are presuming that particularly young children have that common sense in the first place. But what of legislation for water safety? The Health and Safety Commission, which deals with the workplace environment, is the only relevant body on this issue. Its regulations are enforced by either the Health and Safety Executive, or local authorities, depending on the type of workplace. Although the Health and Safety Executive has not produced specific legislation or guidance on ponds in public places, the following legislation applies to leisure parks.
	Section 3 of the Health and Safety at Work, etc., Act 1974 places requirements on employers with regard to members of the public using workplace facilities. The section only sets down a goal—it is not specific. Subsection (1) states:
	"It shall be the duty of every employer to conduct his undertaking in such a way as to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, that persons not in his employment who may be affected thereby are not thereby exposed to risks to their health or safety."
	Likewise, subsection (2) covers the same area with respect to self-employed persons. Subsection (3) states:
	"In such cases as may be prescribed, it shall be the duty of every employer and every self-employed person, in the prescribed circumstances and in the prescribed manner, to give to persons (not being his employees) who may be affected by the way in which he conducts his undertaking ... as might affect their health or safety."
	Further to that, an employer or self-employed person has a legal duty to complete a risk assessment. Risk assessments are a legal requirement under the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999. Regulation 3 stipulates:
	"Every employer shall make a suitable and sufficient assessment of ... (a) the risks to the health and safety of his employees to which they are exposed whilst they are at work; and ... (b) the risks to the health and safety of persons not in his employment arising out of or in connection with the conduct by him of his undertaking".
	The approved code of practice goes on to state:
	"This regulation requires all employers and self-employed people to assess the risks to workers and any others who may be affected by their work or business. This will enable them to identify the measures they need to take to comply with health and safety law. All employers should carry out a systematic general examination of the effect of their undertaking, their work activities and the condition of the premises. Those who employ five or more employees should record the significant findings of that risk assessment.
	A risk assessment is carried out to identify the risks to health and safety to any person arising out of, or in connection with, work or the conduct of their undertaking. It should identify how the risks arise and how they impact on those affected. This information is needed to make decisions on how to manage those risks so that the decisions are made in an informed, rational and structured manner, and the action taken is proportionate.
	A risk assessment should usually involve identifying the hazards present in any working environment or arising out of commercial activities and work activities, and evaluating the extent of the risks involved, taking into account existing precautions and their effectiveness. In this approved code of practice ... (a) a hazard is something with the potential to cause harm (this can include articles, substances, plant or machines, methods of work, the working environment and other aspects of work organisation) ... (b) a risk is the likelihood of potential harm from that hazard being realised. The extent of the risk will depend on ... the likelihood of that harm occurring; ... the potential severity of that harm, i.e. of any resultant injury or adverse health effect; and ... the population which might be affected by the hazard, i.e. the number of people who might be exposed."
	I also have guidelines from another source: "Reservoirs and HSW Act: Inspections Policy". It relates specifically to reservoirs, but the control measures cited may be of some use. With regard to public safety, it says that a risk assessment is required to take into account high-risk areas and the likely actions of persons using a reservoir. It says that fencing or natural barriers may be needed to discourage people from approaching deep water. It says that fishing platforms may be provided to direct anglers away from areas where they could slip into the water and suggests considering the provision of rescue aids within the risk assessment. For example, if the reservoir is visited only by water company employees, they should take rescue aids such as throw-lines to the site.
	Where members of the public regularly gain access to these sites, rescue aids must be located at suitable points. Warning signs should be placed at suitable locations—for example, entry pathways and high-risk areas.
	Do we think that existing legislation is good enough for public amenities? Should there be more specific regulation for public premises? Health and Safety Executive legislation is aimed more at the protection of employees and may be inadequate for public safety. Good employers understand the dangers that are present on their premises and enforce risk assessments, but in understanding the dangers of water the public are possibly overlooked by others. After all, employees are more likely to be aware of the dangers than members of the public.
	For instance, the pond at the caravan park where the Marsdens had their tragic accident had conducted a risk assessment only after an earlier incident at the same pond. We need also to consider that caravan parks tend to attract families with young children. Why does the legislation that governs them not take that fact into consideration? If there were a swimming pool on the site, we would expect at least some safety procedures to be in place. We recognise a pool to be a hazard although I accept that that is another area where the law is vague. That surprises me. It is another area where I would like to see legislation tightened.
	We do not consider that the same requirements are necessary for ponds despite the fact that they could pose the same threat to visitors, particularly the young. In the majority of cases, I would like to see ponds filled in. If they are not, there should be a requirement to ensure that fences are put in place to prevent accidents. In the Marsden case, the pond did have a small fence, but it was not high enough and therefore did not have any effect. If anything, it could be argued that it had a negative effect. Safety can definitely be improved by the provision of adequate fencing. This is not a measure that would place huge expense on park owners, but it may well save lives.
	If we have ponds in our gardens, we may well need to take similar measures, if we believe that they could be accessed by children. We should not lose sight of the fact that many deaths have occurred in just such ponds.
	I would like to see a requirement on park owners to alert all guests to water hazards or any other hazards that are present on the site. Specific water legislation to cover amenities of this sort, such as a caravan park, would make it clear to all concerned that there is a need to take proportionate action to reduce the risk of open water on their premises. Current legislation does not do this, and I believe that it would help all concerned—operators and the public—in diminishing the risk posed by water, especially to young children, if such legislation were in place.
	There is another issue that has an effect on water safety. In carrying out research on this subject, I found it difficult to ascertain who exactly had responsibility for water safety. The water safety forum provided a framework for action, but I found it confusing when trying to ascertain who dealt with what aspect of water safety. The WSF does not deal with such inquiries.
	When pursuing my inquiries on behalf of the Marsdens, I had delays in responses to letters as they were pushed from one department to another. Responsibilities for inland water are spread across several Government Departments and agencies. It was difficult for me to ascertain whether the incident was dealt with by the local authority, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister as it was then, or the Health and Safety Executive, with the Department for Work and Pensions being the enforcing authority. That can lead to further anguish for bereaved parents.
	We need to increase the public awareness programme into water safety for young children. Most parents are aware of all the dangers posed to children, but perhaps the message about water is not pushed hard enough. We instil in our children the dangers posed by traffic on our roads. We tell them about the dangers of getting lost and those of wandering off. Perhaps we face these dangers every day. More emphasis should be given to the dangers of water, particularly in schools.
	We all have a responsibility for children's safety. While the onus is on parents and guardians to mind children and teach them the dangers of water, reforms could be introduced to reduce the chances of death by drowning in certain circumstances. New regulations on water safety in public places would concentrate the owner's mind, and encourage them to carry out risk assessments and take appropriate action. A central Government contact point to deal with all water safety issues would enable inquiries for information to be dealt with quickly and effectively. A co-ordinated national education campaign aimed at parents and guardians could advise them of the dangers to children of water and of their responsibilities.
	In conclusion, I accept that dangers to our children will always exist, but we must do something about water danger. The introduction of sensible legislation and regulation would clearly help, and we need more common sense in this area. The Marsden family have suffered a tragic loss, and they rightly hope and desire that no other family should suffer in such a manner.

Anne McGuire: May I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami) on securing this debate? In his customary way, he has raised an important matter, and I thank him for the opportunity to consider how we can improve safety for children at water attractions by raising the tragic case of Matthew Marsden—a young two-year-old child who sadly died on 21 August 2004.
	First, I am sure that hon. Members will wish to join me in extending sympathy to Matthew's family on their tragic loss. Nothing, as my hon. Friend said, can take away the pain that Mathew's parents feel following the loss of their young son, who was just starting out in life. It is quite understandable that they wish others to learn from their terrible experience and suffering so that young lives are not cut short in a similar tragic accident in future. May I set out the background by looking at drowning rates in the United Kingdom? The risk of drowning is small, with an annual death rate of 0.8 per 100,000 deaths in the UK each year. However, as my hon. Friend identified, the risks to small children are significant. The latest figures from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents show that 131 children drowned in small volumes of water in the 11 years to December 2003, and that 90 of them were under five.
	Most of those accidents happened in garden ponds, water features and paddling pools in the vicinity of the children's own home or in a family environment. Water is highly attractive to children and even the shallowest of ponds can be lethal to the very young. Each and every one of those deaths is a terrible family tragedy. My noble Friend Lord Hunt wrote to my hon. Friend last year about the case. Matthew's drowning on holiday with his family at a caravan park was investigated first by the police, then by Gwynedd county council under health and safety legislation, as enforcement responsibility fell to the local authority, not to the Health and Safety Executive. Formal enforcement action was not taken but, following investigations, the caravan park has filled in the duck pond as a mark of respect to Matthew and his family.
	On the legal position, caravan park owners and operators, like any other responsible employer, must provide healthy and safe working conditions for their employees under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, as my hon. Friend said. They have a responsibility, too, to protect members of the public from their work activities. In addition, they have a duty to carry out risk assessments under the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999.
	That means that operators such as those at the holiday park have a duty to ensure that risks like those presented by the duck pond are properly assessed, managed and controlled. I fully understand that following such a tragic loss, there will be calls for the introduction of additional legal controls with the aim of preventing similar accidents. I regret, however, to advise my hon. Friend that I do not believe that new legislation is the answer.
	Under our existing health and safety legislative framework, it is for dutyholders to identify what their particular hazards and risks are and what precautions are necessary to deal with them in their own circumstances. Such flexibility is important because it enables judgments to be reached on what is appropriate and sensible in various circumstances. The legislative framework provides the freedom to devise solutions that satisfy safety goals in a way that is not prescriptive or bureaucratic. This is aimed at ensuring a proportionate response—a basic principle of good regulation. I do understand, however, that parents who have lost a child in such circumstances may feel that a proportionate response should, indeed, be more regulation.
	There are various types of water attraction, which my hon. Friend highlighted. Those include, for example, boating lakes, swimming pools, both public and domestic, reservoirs, lakes, canals, rivers, the seaside and marinas, as well as duck and garden ponds. Some are run by commercial businesses, some by charities and others by local authorities. Some are located in people's homes and gardens, and others are part of the fabric of our countryside and open to everyone.
	Just as there are many types of attraction, there is a wide range of safety precautions available. These include, for instance, fencing the edges or ensuring that they are gently sloping, flat or well defined, providing lifebelts, providing warning notices and information, and ensuring supervision by staff, parents or responsible adults. When these are attractions to which the public have access, it is for the operators to consider the available precautions and decide which are the most appropriate ones for them in the context of the risks. Of course, everyone has the responsibility to use them in a sensible manner.
	Sensible risk management will usually involve a combination of a number of precautions. Operators should be seeking to effectively manage their risks in their own particular circumstances, yet still allow the facilities to be enjoyed and appreciated by those using them. Tragically, there are no guarantees that trying to make water attractions inaccessible would eradicate risks to children. It is a sad fact that fencing, as my hon. Friend observed, can provide parents with a false sense of security, and accidents can still occur because parents think their children are safe. But fencing can be climbed by older children, and can become damaged and allow access to smaller children.
	Where there is any stretch of water, even the shallowest garden pond, there is potential risk for children, and everyone in a position of responsibility needs to be aware of the risks and take the necessary actions. This may include operators bringing the hazards to the attention of parents. New legislation would not be the answer to the problem. It would not be practical or desirable to try and fence and make inaccessible all ponds and stretches of water, or for some form of formal supervision to be required in all cases. As it is, the existing legislation requires dutyholders to exercise judgement on how best to reduce risks in a sensible way.
	Water is everywhere, and access to many attractions is open to individuals and families to enjoy as they think fit. It would not be possible to make canals, marinas and other water attractions inaccessible, but there are undoubtedly risks to children and others when visiting these attractions. As my hon. Friend acknowledged, risk is a part of everyday life and we cannot eliminate it all together. We certainly would not want to prevent people making use of and enjoying the countryside and seaside where they live or where they visit. We also would not want to require measures that are impractical and, in so doing, inadvertently force the closure of attractions that can be used and enjoyed safely.
	However, it is clear that we should do all that we can to try to minimise the risks of drowning to children, but our approach must be to ensure that current arrangements work as well as possible, that people are fully aware of the risks and how best to manage them and that people are clear about their responsibilities. Often, a combination of measures and responsibilities is needed to ensure that risks are properly managed. That could include fencing and supervision, but it may not be practical or even desirable in all cases.
	The Health and Safety Commission has said that it does not necessarily see new regulation as the solution to all problems, particularly when there are other means of achieving the same ends. Those who have such responsibilities are best placed to ensure that risks are sensibly managed and that the public are protected from harm. In this case, leisure site operators are best placed to ensure that the risks are sensibly managed and that the public are protected from serious harm. Where they fail to fulfil their legal responsibilities, they may be subject to enforcement action, including prosecution under health and safety law. I believe that the existing legislative framework is sufficient to provide for that.
	My hon. Friend has raised an important point about the various bodies involved in water safety, and I regret the difficulties that he had in trying to access some of the information that he needed. He will be aware that the national water safety forum was established following the Government's review into inland water safety, and the forum is endeavouring to bring together information about incidents, casualties and fatalities in water. I will therefore make sure that the information about Matthew Marsden's death will be passed to the forum and also ensure that my hon. Friend's comments about the difficulties that he faced are drawn to their attention.
	Finally, what I have said tonight will be no consolation at all to Matthew's parents. However, we should never cease to learn the lessons from tragedies such as this young child's. That case has only too sadly highlighted the risks to small children of water attractions and the need for those responsible to be alert to the safety measures that are needed. Although we can never totally remove risk from society, we can strive to ensure that people, especially children, live in a society that values them and fully provides for their safety. As a parent myself, I know that Matthew's family, and in particular his parents, may be disappointed by my response tonight, but I reiterate legal change is not the answer in this case. Redoubled efforts by the Government, businesses and others to ensure risks are understood, well-publicised, and sensibly managed are the way forward.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	 Adjourned accordingly at thirteen minutes past Ten o'clock.